No abstract

Nitazoxanide (Alinia®, NTZ) and tizoxanide (TIZ), its active circulating metabolite, belong to a class of agents known as thiazolides (TZD) endowed with broad anti-infective activities. TIZ and RM-4848, the active metabolite of RM-5038, were shown to stimulate innate immunity in vitro. Because natural resistance to HIV-1 infection in HIV-exposed seronegative (HESN) individuals is suggested to be associated with strong innate immune responses, we verified whether TIZ and RM-4848 could reduce the in vitro infectiousness of HIV-1. Peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from 20 healthy donors were infected in vitro with HIV-1BaL in the presence/absence of TIZ or RM4848. HIV-1 p24 were measured at different timepoints. The immunomodulatory abilities of TZD were evaluated by the expression of type I IFN pathway genes and the production of cytokines and chemokines. TZD drastically inhibited in vitro HIV-1 replication (>87%). This was associated with the activation of innate immune responses and with the up-regulation of several interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs), including those involved in cholesterol pathway, particularly the cholesterol-25 hydroxylase (CH25H). TZD inhibition of HIV-1 replication in vitro could be due to their ability to stimulate potent and multifaceted antiviral immune responses. These data warrant the exploration of TZD as preventive/therapeutic agent in HIV infection.

T cell activation plays a central role in immune response and in the maintenance of self-tolerance. We analyzed the evolutionary history of T cell regulatory molecules. Nine genes involved in triggering T cell activation or in regulating the ensuing response evolved adaptively in mammals. Several positively selected sites overlap with positions interacting with the binding partner or with cellular components. Population genetic analysis in humans revealed a complex scenario of local (FASLG, CD40LG, HAVCR2) and worldwide (FAS, ICOSLG) adaptation and H. sapiens-to-Neandertal gene flow (gene transfer between populations). Disease variants in these genes are preferential targets of pathogen-driven selection, and a Crohn's disease risk polymorphism targeted by bacterial-driven selection modulates the expression of ICOSLG in response to a bacterial superantigen. Therefore, we used evolutionary information to generate experimentally testable hypotheses concerning the function of specific genetic variants and indicate that adaptation to infection underlies the maintenance of autoimmune risk alleles.

The protein product of the myxovirus resistance 2 (MX2) gene restricts HIV-1 and simian retroviruses. We demonstrate that MX2 evolved adaptively in mammals with distinct sites representing selection targets in distinct branches; selection mainly involved residues in loop 4, previously shown to carry antiviral determinants. Modeling data indicated that positively selected sites form a continuous surface on loop 4, which folds into two antiparallel α-helices protruding from the stalk domain. A population genetics-phylogenetics approach indicated that the coding region of MX2 mainly evolved under negative selection in the human lineage. Nonetheless, population genetic analyses demonstrated that natural selection operated on MX2 during the recent history of human populations: distinct selective events drove the frequency increase of two haplotypes in the populations of Asian and European ancestry. The Asian haplotype carries a susceptibility allele for melanoma; the European haplotype is tagged by rs2074560, an intronic variant. Analyses performed on three independent European cohorts of HIV-1-exposed seronegative individuals with different geographic origin and distinct exposure route showed that the ancestral (G) allele of rs2074560 protects from HIV-1 infection with a recessive effect (combined P = 1.55 × 10(-4)). The same allele is associated with lower in vitro HIV-1 replication and increases MX2 expression levels in response to IFN-α. Data herein exploit evolutionary information to identify a novel host determinant of HIV-1 infection susceptibility.