Location, Location, Location

摘要

The ability of HIV to reside in a latent form in T cells is a major hurdle to finding a cure. With no widely protective vaccine on the horizon, there is growing interest in understanding how to convert latent HIV into a replication active state, which would allow therapies that target infected cells to eliminate them. Mechanisms that contribute to HIV latency, however, are poorly understood. Using a combination of immuno-3D fluorescent in situ hybridization and chromatin immunoprecipitation, Lusic et al. find that location matters for latency. In T cell lines and in a model of primary T cells chronically infected with HIV, silenced but not active provirus was located close to nuclear bodies, as measured by their association with promyelocytic leukemia protein (PML), a marker of these structures.