Persistence of HIV in an animal model

Description of projects available to graduate students:
The Ambrose lab is interested in understanding persistence of HIV in the body, even during suppressive antiretroviral therapy. We have developed a macaque model in which we can suppress virus to study the persistence of virus in tissue/cellular reservoirs in vivo, which cannot be performed easily in humans. In addition, we are trying to understand the influence of tissue inflammation on re-activation of latent provirus.

Techniques graduate student will learn:
Virus propagation, cell culture including latent virus rescue assays, DNA and RNA extraction from cells/tissues, PCR, RT-PCR, real-time PCR, single-genome sequencing, bulk sequencing, genomic analyses, and digital RNA analyses.