{"doi":"10.1128/mbio.01116-23","title":"The largest HIV-1-infected T cell clones in children on long-term combination antiretroviral therapy contain solo LTRs","abstract":"Combination antiretroviral therapy (cART) suppresses viral replication but does not cure HIV infection because a reservoir of infectious (intact) HIV proviruses persists in long-lived CD4+T cells. However, a large majority (>95%) of HIV-infected cells that persist on effective cART carry defective (non-infectious) proviruses. Defective proviruses consisting of only a single LTR (solo long terminal repeat) are commonly found as endogenous retroviruses in many animal species, but the frequency of solo-LTR HIV proviruses has not been well defined. Here we show that, in five pediatric donors whose viremia was suppressed on cART for at least 5 years, the proviruses in the nine largest clones of HIV-infected cells were solo LTRs. The sizes of five of these clones were assayed longitudinally by integration site-specific quantitative PCR. Minor waxing and waning of the clones was observed, suggesting that these clones are generally stable over time. Our findings show that solo LTRs comprise a large fraction of the proviruses in infected cell clones that persist in children on long-term cART. IMPORTANCE This work highlights that severely deleted HIV-1 proviruses comprise a significant proportion of the proviral landscape and are often overlooked.","journal":"mBio","year":2023,"id":344765,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":13,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9455,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":911088,"name":"Dimiter Demirov","orcid":"0000-0002-6119-7199","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1005509,"name":"Carli Gordijn","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1083658,"name":"Mary Grace Katusiime","orcid":"0000-0002-0468-0600","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":258963,"name":"Michael J. Bale","orcid":"0000-0002-6899-1459","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":255121,"name":"Xiaolin Wu","orcid":"0000-0002-6432-1300","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":351536,"name":"Daria Wells","orcid":"0000-0002-3475-3591","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":258968,"name":"Stephen H. Hughes","orcid":"0000-0002-9176-4377","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":295667,"name":"Mark F. Cotton","orcid":"0000-0003-2559-6034","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":258969,"name":"John W. Mellors","orcid":"0000-0002-3737-9742","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":258965,"name":"Mary F. Kearney","orcid":"0000-0003-3839-6576","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":69675,"name":"Gert U. van Zyl","orcid":"0000-0003-3021-5101","position":11,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1083657,"name":"Johannes C. Botha","orcid":"0000-0002-7635-7810","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":57,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:11:35.133818Z","pmid":"37530525","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}