S. L. Balakrishna, Bharti Gupta and Parikipandla Sridevi
The host cell infection by Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is initiated through the entry of the virus into the cell. The major target cells of HIV are cluster of differentiation 4 (CD4)+ T lymphocytes, which express co-receptors, chemokine receptor 5 (CCR5) or C-X-C chemokine receptor type 4 (CXCR4). HIV-1 envelope glycoprotein 120 (Gp120) binds to its primary receptor CD4, a member of the immunoglobulin superfamily enhances T-Cell Receptor (TCR)-mediated signaling, is absolutely required for the infection. Recent reports on cell surface marker expression levels by infecting CD4+ T cells with HIV-1 viruses gave an insight into host cell responses. In our study, we infected Jurkat, SupT1 cells and PBMCs with HIV-1 and analyzed the expression of cell surface markers gp120, CD4, CCR5 and CXCR4 levels by quantitative real time PCR (qRT-PCR) at different time intervals of post infection. Our study shows that there is ~ 5-fold increase in expression of gp120 1 h post infection and 1.5-fold increase in relative expression of CD4 and CCR5 at 2 h post infection, whereas CXCR4 showed differential up-regulation in different cell lines which needs further analysis.
