Innate Immune Surveillance of HIV-1 During Transmission and Systemic Infection

For the proposed project the Hope laboratory will provide human rectal biopsy cultures and mucosal immune cells. The material will be used to identify and characterize innate and intrinsic mucosal responses to HIV infection at mucosal barriers. In some cases, the explants will be prepared to generate for long term infections and studied by p24 kinetics and/or prepared for RNA sequencing. We will also conduct frozen sectioning and immunofluorescent imaging of infected and treated tissue. We will isolate immune cells from the explant tissues for infectivity studies, RNA isolation, flow cytometry, and immunofluorescence staining. Additionally, the lab will conduct with capsid stability and colocalization assays with widltype vs CA mutant virus or TF vs CH.