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This article is part of the supplement: Frontiers of Retrovirology: Complex retroviruses, retroelements and their hosts

Open Access Poster presentation

Human miRNAs: an antiviral defense mechanism

Kartik Soni1*, Jasmine K Ahluwalia1, Sohrab Z Khan2, Beena Pillai1, Debashis Mitra1 and Samir K Brahmachari1

  • * Corresponding author: Kartik Soni

Author Affiliations

1 Instituite of Genomics and Integrative Biology, New Delhi, India

2 National Centre For Cell Science, Pune, India

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Retrovirology 2009, 6(Suppl 2):P83 doi:10.1186/1742-4690-6-S2-P83

Published: 24 September 2009

First paragraph (this article has no abstract)

miRNAs are short 21-24 nt RNAs that mediate post transcriptional repression of target genes. Various reports have shown that miRNAs are capable of repressing the gene expression levels of different viruses, leading to the suggestion that miRNAs are key mediators of host-virus interaction [1]. HIV-1 is a retrovirus known to cause AIDS, one of the major diseases in humans. The nef gene of the HIV-1 has been shown to be important for virus repression of CD4+ cells and virus progression. It has also been shown earlier that patients infected with nef deleted HIV-1 do not progress from infected to diseased state for longer periods of time, resulting in the Long Term Non-Progressor phenotype [2].