The HIV1 p24 protein performs highly complex orchestrated tasks during the assembly, budding maturation and infection stages of the viral replication cycle. During viral assembly, the proteins form membrane associations and self-associations that ultimately result in budding of an immature virion from the infected cell. Gag p24, the major capsid protein of the HIV-1 virion, has been used in clinical trials as one of the components of the HIV-1 vaccine because of the high degree of sequence conservation between different isolates.