Signatures of immune selection in intact and defective proviruses distinguish HIV-1 elite controllers.

ABSTRACT: Increasing evidence suggests that durable drug-free control of HIV-1 replication is enabled by effective cellular immune responses that may induce an attenuated viral reservoir configuration with a weaker ability to drive viral rebound. Here, we comprehensively tracked effects of antiviral immune responses on intact and defective proviral sequences from elite controllers (ECs), analyzing both classical escape mutations and HIV-1 chromosomal integration sites as biomarkers of antiviral immune selection pressure. We observed that, within ECs, defective proviruses were commonly located in permissive genic euchromatin positions, which represented an apparent contrast to autologous intact proviruses that were frequently located in heterochromatin regions; this suggests differential immune selec

SUBMITTER: Lian X 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9202005 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature