Epigenetic modulations in activated cells early after HIV-1 infection and their possible functional consequences.

Epigenetic modifications refer to a number of biological processes which alter the structure of chromatin and its transcriptional activity such as DNA methylation and histone post-translational processing. Studies have tried to elucidate how the viral genome and its products are affected by epigenetic modifications imposed by cell machinery and how it affects the ability of the virus to either, replicate and produce a viable progeny or be driven to latency. The purpose of this study was to evaluate epigenetic modifications in PBMCs and CD4+ cells after HIV-1 infection analyzing three approaches: (i) global DNA- methylation; (ii) qPCR array and (iii) western blot.