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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

HIV, drug-resistant strains, FDC, follicular dendritic cells

College

Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Department

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Abstract

My ORCA research project was designed to assess the level of diversity found in a patient’s body. When a doctor prescribes drugs to combat HIV, he or she must first assess whether the patient houses drug-resistant strains. This is usually done by extracting blood from the patient and sampling the HIV found within. There is a general assumption made that if there are no drugresistant strains of HIV found in the blood, then the prescribed drugs will be effective at controlling the virus. However, if the HIV found in the blood of the patient was not fully representative of the level of HIV diversity found throughout the patient’s entire body, the drug treatment may not be effective. In order to answer that question, samples of HIV extracted from a different part of the body would need to be sampled and compared with HIV samples from the blood. My project specifically revolved around determining the diversity of HIV found within a sample of cells known as follicular dendritic cells. Follicular dendritic cells, or FDCs, are of especial interest to HIV research in that they are a reservoir in the body for HIV. By sampling and classifying the HIV quasi-species that are found on FDCs, one can then compare them to virus quasi-species found circulating in the blood. The benefit of this comparison would be to clarify whether a resistance screening only sampling HIV from a patient’s blood would suffice in determining drug resistances. My task in this question was to determine the DNA sequences of the HIV found on FDCs from one patient so that those sequences could later be compared with samples of HIV found in that same patient’s blood.

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