Published online before print June 13, 2008

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Copyright © 2008 American Society for Investigative Pathology
Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, doi:10.2353/jmoldx.2008.070074

Accepted for publication February 12, 2008.

Article

Successful Application of Hyperbranched Multidisplacement Genomic Amplification to Detect HIV-1 Sequences in Single Neurons Removed from Autopsy Brain Sections by Laser Capture Microdissection

From the Department of Pathology, University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Miami, Florida

^@ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: cpetito{at}med.miami.edu.

	Abstract

To confirm studies suggesting that HIV-1 infects neurons and to determine whether CD8⁺ T lymphocytes traffic to HIV-1-infected neurons, we used laser capture microdissection to remove hippocampal neurons with and without perineuronal CD8⁺ T cells from AIDS patients with HIV-1 encephalitis (HIVE) or without HIVE and from normal controls. We used hyperbranched multidisplacement amplification for whole gene amplification (MDA-WGA) plus two rounds of PCR to amplify housekeeping sequences (HK⁺) and, in HK⁺ samples, to amplify HIV-1 gag, nef, and pol sequences. Sample size and, in single neurons, MDA-WGA correlated with housekeeping gene amplification (P < 0.05), whereas patient group and postmortem interval did not (P > 0.05). Neuronal viral sequences correlated with HIVE (43% vs. 13% and 0 in non-HIVE and controls, respectively) and, in HIVE cases, with perineuronal CD8⁺ T lymphocytes (70% in CD8⁺ samples vs. 37% of CD8^- samples). Our results suggest that MDA-WGA is a useful technique when analyzing DNA from single cells from autopsy brains, supporting prior studies that show that neurons may contain HIV-1 neuronal sequences in vivo. The association between neuronal infection and perineuronal CD8⁺ T cells supports our hypothesis that these cells specifically traffic to infected neurons but raises the possibility that CD8⁺ T cells, if infected, could transmit virus to neurons.