Co-variation between HERV-K RNA Expression and CD4 Cell Counts in Untreated HIV-1 Infected Individuals
Gregorio Garza, Huijian Sun, Estefanía Mattenberger-Cantú , Haitian Wu , Fangling Xu , Albert Li , Sofia Ansari , Philip Keiser , Juan C. Sarria
Affiliation
- 1Department of Pathology, University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Boulevard, Galveston, TX, USA
- 2División de Ciencias de la Salud, Universidad de Monterrey, Nuevo León, México
- 3Internal Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Boulevard, Galveston, TX, USA
- §Authors contributed equally to this work
Corresponding Author
Jianli Dong, Molecular Diagnostics Division, Department of Pathology, University of Texas Medical Branch, 301 University Boulevard, Galveston, Texas 77555-0743, USA, Tel: (409) 772-4866, E-mail: jidong@utmb.edu
Citation
Dong, J., et al. Covariation Between HERV-K RNA Expression and CD4 Cell Counts in Untreated HIV-1 Infected Individuals. (2016) J Clin Trials Pathol Case Stud 1(1): 17- 21.
Copy rights
© 2016 Dong, J. This is an Open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Keywords
Abstract
Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) have been implicated in the etiology of cancer, chronic inflammation, and other diseases, and emerging data supports the regulation and functional interaction between K type HERV (HERV-K) and HIV-1. In this study, we performed a reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay using DNase I digestion to remove “contaminating” HERV-K genomic DNA and examined HERV-K RNA expression in plasma samples from 54 untreated, newly diagnosed, HIV-1 infected individuals. We found that, HERV-K expression did not correlate with HIV-1 viral load. However, the mean CD4 cell count was significantly lower in HERV-K RNA positive specimens. Further studies are necessary to examine the regulatory relationship between HERV-K and CD4 cell counts in HIV-1 infected individuals.
