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Journal of Virology, January 1999, p. 855-860, Vol. 73, No. 1
Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, The
Rockefeller University, New York, New York1;
Chiron Corporation, Emeryville,
California2;
Department of Zoology,
University of Oxford, Oxford, United
Kingdom3;
Experimental Ecology, ETH,
Zurich, Switzerland4; and
Theoretical
Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New
Mexico5
Received 1 September 1998/Accepted 22 September 1998
Perturbation of the equilibrium between human immunodeficiency
virus type 1 (HIV-1) and the infected host by administering antiretroviral agents has revealed the rapid turnover of both viral
particles and productively infected cells. In this study, we used the
infusion of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) particles into rhesus
macaques to obtain a more accurate estimate of viral clearance in vivo.
Consistently, exogenously infused virions were cleared from plasma with
an extremely short half-life, on the order of minutes (a mean of 3.3 min). This new estimate is ~100-fold lower than the upper bound of
6 h previously reported for HIV-1 in infected humans. In select
animals, multiple tissues were collected at the completion of each
experiment to track the potential sites of virion clearance. Detectable
levels of SIV RNA were found in lymph nodes, spleen, lungs, and liver,
but not in other tissues examined. However, only ~1 to 10% or less
of the infused virions were accounted for by the thorough tissue
sampling, indicating that the vast majority of the infused particles
must have been degraded over a short period of time. Should the rapid
clearance of virions described here be applicable to infected patients, then HIV-1 production and thus the number of productively infected CD4+ T lymphocytes or the viral burst size must be
proportionally higher than previous minimal estimates.
0022-538X/99/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1999, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Rapid Clearance of Simian Immunodeficiency Virus Particles from
Plasma of Rhesus Macaques
*
Corresponding author. Mailing address: Aaron Diamond
AIDS Research Center, 455 First Ave., Seventh Floor, New York, NY
10016. Phone: (212) 725-0018. Fax: (212) 725-1126. E-mail:
dho{at}adarc.org.
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