. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2019 Sep 11.

Published in final edited form as: Curr Opin HIV AIDS. 2017 Mar;12(2):182–189. doi: 10.1097/COH.0000000000000344

Table 2.

Advantages and limitations of newer HIV reservoir assays

Assay description	Advantages	Limitations

Inducible virus assays: HIV-1 RNA detected in supernatant after cell stimulation	Faster, less costly and more sensitive than QVOA	Does not differentiate inducible virus from replication competent virus
Limiting dilution and near full-length sequencing of proviruses	More sensitive for likely replication competent virus than QVOA	Limited throughput; costly; apparently intact proviral genome does not prove infectiousness
Fractional single cell assays by limiting dilution PCR	Allows investigation of the contribution of individual cells in transcription and virus production	Limited throughput. High-throughput single cell assays are in development
Integration site assays	Investigate the role of clonal proliferation in viral persistence	Current assays have a low throughput and cannot link proviral sequences to integration sites. Not suitable to study the effect of interventions on population size and survival of particular clones

QVOA, quantitative viral outgrowth assay.