Figure 3.

Antiretroviral therapy of HIV-1-infected primary macrophages decreases packaging of viral genomic RNA into EVs, but not viral short, non-coding RNAs. Primary monocytes from three healthy donors were differentiated using PMA (10 µM) for 5 days, infected (89.6 dual-tropic HIV-1 virus; MOI of 1), and then treated twice with cART (45 µM) for 7 days. (a) EVs were isolated from cell supernatants using NT80/82. EV samples were then subjected to RT-qPCR with primers specific for HIV-1 TAR, TAR-gag, and genomic RNA (See Methods). (b) Intracellular viral RNA levels corresponding to the samples in panel a were measured using RT-qPCR with the same primers. Error bars represent ± S.D. of three technical replicates. A two-tailed Student’s t-test was used to assess significance: *p < 0.05; **p < 0.01; ***p < 0.001.