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Effects of human TRIM5alpha polymorphisms on antiretroviral function and susceptibility to human immunodeficiency virus infection.

Javanbakht H, An P, Gold B, Petersen DC, O'Huigin C, Nelson GW, O'Brien SJ, Kirk GD, Detels R, Buchbinder S, Donfield S, Shulenin S, Song B, Perron MJ, Stremlau M, Sodroski J, Dean M, Winkler C

Department of Cancer Immunology and AIDS, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Division of AIDS, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

TRIM5alpha acts on several retroviruses, including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV-1), to restrict cross-species transmission. Using natural history cohorts and tissue culture systems, we examined the effect of polymorphism in human TRIM5alpha on HIV-1 infection. In African Americans, the frequencies of two non-coding SNP variant alleles in exon 1 and intron 1 of TRIM5 were elevated in HIV-1-infected persons compared with uninfected subjects. By contrast, the frequency of the variant allele encoding TRIM5alpha 136Q was relatively elevated in uninfected individuals, suggesting a possible protective effect. TRIM5alpha 136Q protein exhibited slightly better anti-HIV-1 activity in tissue culture than the TRIM5alpha R136 protein. The 43Y variant of TRIM5alpha was less efficient than the H43 variant at restricting HIV-1 and murine leukemia virus infections in cultured cells. The ancestral TRIM5 haplotype specifying no observed variant alleles appeared to be protective against infection, and the corresponding wild-type protein partially restricted HIV-1 replication in vitro. A single logistic regression model with a permutation test indicated the global corrected P value of <0.05 for both SNPs and haplotypes. Thus, polymorphism in human TRIM5 may influence susceptibility to HIV-1 infection, a possibility that merits additional evaluation in independent cohorts.

Published 2 October 2006 in Virology, 354(1): 15-27.
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