Documenting the interaction of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) proteins with those of the host cell is crucial to understanding the process of HIV-1 replication and pathogenesis, and provides an essential foundation for the development of safe and effective therapeutic and prevention strategies to combat AIDS. Although numerous interactions have been reported in the scientific literature there is currently no publicly available source for efficiently accessing this information. Therefore, the Division of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (DAIDS) of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has initiated a project, in collaboration with Southern Research Institute and the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), designed to compile a comprehensive database of the described interactions between HIV-1 and cellular proteins.

The goal of this project is to provide scientists in the field of HIV/AIDS research a concise, yet detailed, summary of all known interactions of HIV-1 proteins with host cell proteins, other HIV-1 proteins, or proteins from disease organisms associated with HIV/AIDS. To this end, the database has been designed to track the following information for each protein-protein interaction identified in the literature:

• NCBI Reference Sequence (RefSeq) protein accession numbers.
• NCBI Entrez Gene (LocusLink) ID numbers.
• Amino acids from each protein that are known to be involved in the interaction.
• Brief description of the protein-protein interaction.
• Keywords to support searching for interactions.
• National Library of Medicine (NLM) PubMed identification numbers (PMIDs) for all journal articles describing the interaction.

The initial review of the scientific literature and development of the database was performed by Mr. Roger Ptak and Dr. Brigitte Beer (Southern Research Institute, Frederick, Maryland). The work was supported by NIH contract N01-AI-05415, Specialized In Vitro Virological Evaluations Of Strategies To Combat HIV/AIDS, under direction of Dr. Roger Miller, Project Officer, DAIDS, NIAID. DAIDS gratefully acknowledges the efforts of Drs. Kim Pruitt, Donna Maglott, and Ken Katz (NCBI, NLM) for linking the database to NCBI programs and overseeing the updating of the database .