HIV-1 Structural Proteins Serve as PAMPs for TLR2 Heterodimers Significantly Increasing Infection and Innate Immune Activation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Immune activation is critical to HIV infection and pathogenesis; however, our understanding of HIV innate immune activation remains incomplete. Recently we demonstrated that soluble TLR2 (sTLR2) physically inhibited HIV-induced NFκB activation and inflammation, as well as HIV-1 infection. In light of these findings, we hypothesized that HIV-1 structural proteins may serve as pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs) for cellular TLR2 heterodimers. These studies made use of primary human T cells and TZMbl cells stably transformed to express TLR2 (TZMbl-2). Our results demonstrated that cells expressing TLR2 showed significantly increased proviral DNA compared to cells lacking TLR2, and mechanistically this may be due to a TLR2-mediated increased CCR5 expression. Importantly, we show that HIV-1 structural proteins, p17, p24, and gp41, act as viral PAMPs signaling through TLR2 and its heterodimers leading to significantly increased immune activation via the NFκB signaling pathway. Using co-immunoprecipitation and a dot blot method, we demonstrated direct protein interactions between these viral PAMPs and TLR2, while only p17 and gp41 bound to TLR1. Specifically, TLR2/1 heterodimer recognized p17 and gp41, while p24 lead to immune activation through TLR2/6. These results were confirmed using TLR2/1 siRNA knock down assays which ablated p17 and gp41-induced cellular activation and through studies of HEK293 cells expressing selected TLRs. Interestingly, our results show in the absence of TLR6, p24 bound to TLR2 and blocked p17 and gp41-induced activation, thus providing a novel mechanism by which HIV-1 can manipulate innate sensing. Taken together, our results identified, for the first time, novel HIV-1 PAMPs that play a role in TLR2-mediated cellular activation and increased proviral DNA. These findings have important implications for our fundamental understanding of HIV-1 immune activation and pathogenesis, as well as HIV-1 vaccine development.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".