Journal article
Thymic plasmacytoid dendritic cells are susceptible to productive HIV-1 infection and efficiently transfer R5 HIV-1 to thymocytes in vitro
VA Evans, L Lal, R Akkina, A Solomon, E Wright, SR Lewin, PU Cameron
Retrovirology | Published : 2011
Abstract
Background: HIV-1 infection of the thymus contributes to the defective regeneration and loss of CD4+ T cells in HIV-1-infected individuals. As thymic dendritic cells (DC) are permissive to infection by HIV-1, we examined the ability of thymic DC to enhance infection of thymocytes which may contribute to the overall depletion of CD4+ T cells. We compared productive infection in isolated human thymic and blood CD11c+ myeloid DC (mDC) and CD123+ plasmacytoid DC (pDC) using enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) CCR5 (R5)-tropic NL(AD8) and CXCR4 (X4)-tropic NL4-3 HIV-1 reporter viruses. Transfer of productive HIV-1 infection from thymic mDC and pDC was determined by culturing these DC subset..
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Awarded by National Institutes of Health
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Damian Purcell (University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia) for providing us with the EGFP-reporter viruses. We thank Andrew Cochrane (Royal Melbourne Childrens' Hospital, Parkville, Australia) and Stuart Berzins (University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia) for providing us with thymus tissue. This work was supported by the National Heath and Medical Research Council (Program Grants 358399 [SRL, PUC] and 510488 [DP]; Practitioner Fellowship [S.R.L]), The Alfred Foundation [SRL], Monash University (Graduate Scholarship) [VAE] and the National Institute of Health (project grants AI073255 and AI057066 [RA]).