Sequence analysis of HIV-1 insertion sites in peripheral blood lymphocytes

An essential component of the HIV-1 life cycle involves insertion in the genome of an infected cell. The site of HIV-1 integration has the potential to disrupt a gene and perturb a normal cellular function. To begin to address whether disease pathogenesis may correlate with the site of insertion, flanking cellular sequences at these HIV integrated regions were directly amplified from peripheral blood mononuclear cells DNA from a broad range of infected individuals using an inverse polymerase chain reaction strategy. Amplified flanking regions were sequenced and examined for similarity to the nucleic acid database. In this group of analyzed samples, the HIV-1 provirus was inserted within non-coding regions throughout the genome of the infected host, in which 7/14 sites were positioned in close proximity to different Alu repetitive elements while 2/14 sites were located within intron sequences. Insertions were also detected at sites without a specific gene designation but not within short tandem repetitive sequences, telomeres or centromeric repeat regions. Altogether, it is expected that this approach will yield new information on sites of integration by HIV-1 that may be associated with the pathogenic manifestations of disease progression.