Panel of prototypical raltegravir-resistant infectious molecular clones in a novel integrase-deleted cloning vector.

We created an HIV-1 cloning vector, pNL4.3DeltaIN, to generate recombinant infectious molecular clones for analysis of patient-derived HIV-1 integrase coding regions. Using this vector, we constructed a panel of clinically derived viruses with the canonical patterns of raltegravir resistance mutations and submitted the panel to the NIH AIDS Research and Reference Reagent Program. Investigational integrase inhibitors with activity against these clones are likely to retain activity against the most clinically relevant raltegravir-resistant variants.