A Historical Account of Retroviral Assembly and Budding.

This historical review, written in the year the first-in-class drug targeting the human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) capsid protein was approved by the Food and Drug Administration, focuses on a significant piece of insight provided in an editorial published in the journal AIDS in 1991 by retrovirus investigators John Wills and Rebecca Craven. Their conceptual framework of retroviral assembly and budding provided a foundation that has been strengthened and expanded over the years through studies engaging structural biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, cell biology, and developments in imaging technology. The collective validates a long-held consensus that elucidating capsid assembly could lead to innovative and successful drug discovery.