Placental Hofbauer cells assemble and sequester HIV-1 in tetraspanin-positive compartments that are accessible to broadly neutralizing antibodies.

Introduction: Within monocyte-derived macrophages, HIV-1 accumulates in intracellular virus-containing compartments (VCCs) that are inaccessible to the external environment, which implicate these cells as latently infected HIV-1 reservoirs. During mother-to-child transmission of HIV-1, human placental macrophages (Hofbauer cells (HCs)) are viral targets, and have been shown to be infected in vivo and sustain low levels of viral replication in vitro; however, the risk of in utero transmission is less than 7%. The role of these primary macrophages as viral reservoirs is largely undefined.

Gene expression analysis from human immunodeficiency virus type 1 subtype C promoter and construction of bicistronic reporter vectors.

We report the cloning and sequence analysis of the long terminal repeat (LTR) of several primary HIV-1 subtype C strains of India. Phylogenetically, all the LTRs and the paired env sequences clustered with subtype C reference strains. The LTRs demonstrated extensive polymorphism in the transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) within the enhancer and the modulator regions.

Transactivation and signaling functions of Tat are not correlated: biological and immunological characterization of HIV-1 subtype-C Tat protein.

Background: Of the diverse subtypes of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type-1 (HIV-1), subtype-C strains cause a large majority of infections worldwide. The reasons for the global dominance of HIV-1 subtype-C infections are not completely understood. Tat, being critical for viral infectivity and pathogenesis, may differentially modulate pathogenic properties of the viral subtypes.

Identification of unique B/C recombinant strains of HIV-1 in the southern state of Karnataka, India.

We characterized the molecular nature of a large number of primary HIV-1 isolates in the four southern states of India. In addition to confirming a predominance of subtype C infection, for the first time we identified three B/C recombinant viruses in a subset of 115 samples. Unexpectedly, env sequences of two of the three B/C recombinants phylogenetically clustered with subtype B strains of the USA.