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Intracellular dynamics of HIV infection

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journal contribution
posted on 2014-01-01, 00:00 authored by J Petravic, P Ellenberg, M L Chan, G Paukovics, R Smyth, Johnson Mak, D Miles
Early studies of HIV infection dynamics suggested that virus-producing HIV-infected cells had an average half-life of approximately 1 day. However, whether this average behavior is reflective of the dynamics of individual infected cells is unclear. Here, we use HIV-enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) constructs and flow cytometry sorting to explore the dynamics of cell infection, viral protein production, and cell death in vitro. By following the numbers of productively infected cells expressing EGFP over time, we show that infected cell death slows down over time. Although infected cell death in vivo could be very different, our results suggest that the constant decay of cell numbers observed in vivo during antiretroviral treatment could reflect a balance of cell death and delayed viral protein production. We observe no correlation between viral protein production and death rate of productively infected cells, showing that viral protein production is not likely to be the sole determinant of the death of HIV-infected cells. Finally, we show that all observed features can be reproduced by a simple model in which infected cells have broad distributions of productive life spans, times to start viral protein production, and viral protein production rates. This broad spectrum of the level and timing of viral protein production provides new insights into the behavior and characteristics of HIV-infected cells.

History

Journal

Journal of virology

Volume

88

Pagination

1113 - 1124

Location

Washington DC

Open access

  • Yes

ISSN

0022-538X

eISSN

1098-5514

Language

eng

Publication classification

C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal

Copyright notice

2014, American Society for Microbiology

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