Do Early Maternal Antibodies Facilitate Oral Transmission of HIV in Infants?

work scope from original proposal The Hope laboratory will determine how HIV interacts with the oral mucosal of newborn and juvenile macaques and identify the cells infected by the initial inoculum at the portal of transmission. This will be accomplished by direct oral exposure of animals to fluorescently tagged viral particles at the Yerkes National Primate Center. At designated time points the animals will be necropsied and the tissues will be prepared in cryosections and sent to the Hope laboratory in Chicago. The tissue blocks will be cryosectioned and analyzed for the number and depth of penetration of individual viral particles. Complementary studies will be done to identify the first cells infected using SIV based gene therapy vectors that express fluorescent proteins. The vectors will be pseudotyped with HIV or SIV envelope. In later years, we will determine how opsonized (antibody bound) viral particles behave differently in this system, especially relating to studies of virus penetration of mucosal barriers. We anticipate that tissues from approximately 10-15 animals will be analyzed every year.