Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Latent virus integrated into the host's genome in CD4+ T-cells remains the main barrier to HIV cure. However, our knowledge of the distribution of genetics and age of the integrated virus in different types of CD4+ T-cells is incomplete. Here we characterized these distributions in four subsets of CD4+ T-cell: naïve, central memory, transitional memory and effector memory. We sorted CD4+ T-cells collected from 5 participants into the four subsets and then sequenced HIV DNA integrated into these cells. We then assessed the subsets for compartmentalization of HIV; in other words we asked if viruses in the same subset were more similar to each other than viruses found in other subsets. Finally we applied a phylogenetic approach to estimate the ages of the integrated virus in each cell type using previously extracted virus from 4 of the participants' plasma. Two of the five participants showed evidence of compartmentalization. The age distributions between were comparable in two of the participants; however in one participant, viruses in effector memory cells were youngest and in a different participant, viruses in naïve cells were youngest. HIV cure researchers should consider the varying composition of latent HIV sequences between hosts and between CD4+ T-cell subsets when developing cure strategies.