Testing the Infection Hypothesis
Perhaps some people are not infected by HIV because of an unusual feature of their cells that prevents HIV from binding, infecting, or replicating.

We’ll test this by mixing cells from EU individuals with several strains of HIV-1, the virus that is the major cause of AIDS. Some of the strains were isolated from HIV-positive individuals and some arose during lab cultivation, but all are either M-tropic, which tend to infect macrophages early in an HIV infection, or T-tropic, which tend to infect T cells later in an infection. This experiment tests if cells from EU individuals can be infected and support replication of any HIV isolates. Cells from uninfected people, who presumably do not have the EU trait, are the controls.

INSTRUCTIONS:
Click NEXT to view the data from this experiment, performed on five HIV-resistant people.