Anna Valenza

TL;DR: The absence of a correlation between plasma and semen loads suggests that semen and blood are distinct viral compartments, and HIV‐1 ‐infected subjects are potentially infectious at all stages of immunodeficiency.

TL;DR: PCR is the method of choice for the detection of viral nucleic acids present at very low amounts in biological samples, and it allows the molecular study of most acute and persistent viral infections.

TL;DR: Interestingly, despite the increasing viremia level associated with infection progression, the mean transcriptional activity of individual infected cells was found to be only moderately greater in AIDS patients than in asymptomatic infected subjects, and it was noted that quantitation of HIV-1 genomic RNA in plasma samples and quantitation in peripheral blood mononuclear cells appear to be more reliable and sensitive markers of viral activity than quantitative analysis of proviral HIV- 1 sequences in peripheral lymphocytes.

TL;DR: In patients under treatment with powerful antiretroviral compounds, viral MS transcripts rapidly fell to undetectable levels, indicating that in vivo, levels of MS mRNAs in PBMCs are closely associated with the number of newly infected cells and suggesting a new role for the quantitative analysis of HIV-1 transcription in infected patients.

TL;DR: The results shown here indicate that direct RNA parameters are quantitative molecular indices sensitive enough to be used for a more accurate evaluation of the natural history of this infection and that an indirect parameter, the mean transcriptional activity for each provirus in CD4+ T lymphocytes, may be important in studying this infection in vivo at the molecular level.