Schultz, AnkeSopper, SieghartSauermann, UlrikeMeyerhans, AndreasSuspène, Rodolphe2015-03-102015-03-102012Schultz A, Sopper S, Sauermann U, Meyerhans A, Suspène R. Stable multi-infection of splenocytes during SIV infection - the basis for/ncontinuous recombination. Retrovirology. 2012; 9: 31. DOI 10.1186/1742-4690-9-311742-4690http://hdl.handle.net/10230/23175BACKGROUND: Recombination is an important mechanism in the generation of genetic diversity of the human (HIV) and simian (SIV) immunodeficiency viruses. It requires the co-packaging of divergent RNA genomes into the same retroviral capsid and subsequent template switching during the reverse transcription reaction. By HIV-specific fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), we have previously shown that the splenocytes from 2 chronically infected patients with Castelman's disease were multi-infected and thus fulfill the in vivo requirements to generate genetic diversity by recombination. In order to analyze when multi-infection first occurs during a lentivirus infection and how the distribution of multi-infection evolves during the disease course, we now determined the SIV copy numbers from splenocytes of 11 SIVmac251-infected rhesus macaques cross-sectionally covering the time span of primary infection throughout to end-stage immunodeficiency. RESULTS: SIV multi-infection of single splenocytes was readily detected in all monkeys and all stages of the infection. Single-infected cells were more frequent than double- or triple- infected cells. There was no strong trend linking the copy number distribution to plasma viral load, disease stage, or CD4 cell counts. CONCLUSIONS: SIV multi-infection of single cells is already established during the primary infection phase thus enabling recombination to affect viral evolution in vivo throughout the disease course.application/pdfeng© 2012 Schultz et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Recombinació genèticainfo:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1742-4690-9-31SIVFISHRecombinationProvirus copy numberinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess