HIV infection treatment strategies have historically defined effectiveness through measuring patient plasma HIV RNA. While combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) can reduce plasma viral load (pVL) to undetectable levels, the degree that HIV is eliminated from other anatomical sites remains unclear. We investigated the HIV DNA levels in 229 varied autopsy tissues from 20 HIV-positive (HIV ؉ ) cART-treated study participants with low or undetectable plasma VL and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) VL prior to death who were enrolled in the National Neurological AIDS Bank (NNAB) longitudinal study and autopsy cohort. Extensive medical histories were obtained for each participant. Autopsy specimens, including at least six brain and nonbrain tissues per participant, were reviewed by study pathologists. HIV DNA, measured in tissues by quantitative and droplet digital PCR, was identified in 48/87 brain tissues and 82/142 nonbrain tissues at levels >200 HIV copies/million cell equivalents. No participant was found to be completely free of tissue HIV. Parallel sequencing studies from some tissues recovered intact HIV DNA and RNA. Abnormal histological findings were identified in all participants, especially in brain, spleen, lung, lymph node, liver, aorta, and kidney. All brain tissues demonstrated some degree of pathology. Ninety-five percent of participants had some degree of atherosclerosis, and 75% of participants died with cancer. This study assists in characterizing the anatomical locations of HIV, in particular, macrophage-rich tissues, such as the central nervous system (CNS) and testis. Additional studies are needed to determine if the HIV recovered from tissues promotes the pathogenesis of inflammatory diseases, such as HIV-associated neurocognitive disorders, cancer, and atherosclerosis. IMPORTANCEIt is well-known that combined antiretroviral therapy (cART) can reduce plasma HIV to undetectable levels; however, cART cannot completely clear HIV infection. An ongoing question is, "Where is HIV hiding?" A well-studied HIV reservoir is "resting" T cells, which can be isolated from blood products and succumb to cART once activated. Less-studied reservoirs are anatomical tissue samples, which have unknown cART penetration, contain a comparably diverse spectrum of potentially HIV-infected immune cells, and are important since <2% of body lymphocytes actually reside in blood. We examined 229 varied autopsy specimens from 20 HIV ؉ participants who died while on cART and identified that >50% of tissues were HIV infected. Additionally, we identified considerable pathology in participants' tissues, especially in brain, spleen, lung, lymph node, liver, aorta, and kidney. This study substantiates that tissueassociated HIV is present despite cART and can inform future studies into HIV persistence.

Real-world datasets commonly have issues with data imbalance. There are several approaches such as weighting, sub-sampling, and data modeling for handling these data. Learning in the presence of data imbalances presents a great challenge to machine learning. Techniques such as support-vector machines have excellent performance for balanced data, but may fail when applied to imbalanced datasets. In this paper, we propose a new undersampling technique for selecting instances from the majority class. The performance of this approach was evaluated in the context of several real biological imbalanced data. The ratios of negative to positive samples vary from ~9:1 to ~100:1. Useful classifiers have high sensitivity and specificity. Our results demonstrate that the proposed selection technique improves the sensitivity compared to weighted support-vector machine and available results in the literature for the same datasets.

There is evidence that immune-activated macrophages infected with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) are associated with tissue damage and serve as a long-lived viral reservoir during therapy. In this study, we analyzed 780 HIV genetic sequences generated from 53 tissues displaying normal and abnormal histopathology. We found up to 50% of the sequences from abnormal lymphoid and macrophage rich non-lymphoid tissues were intra-host viral recombinants. The presence of extensive recombination, especially in non-lymphoid tissues, implies that HIV-1 infected macrophages may significantly contribute to the generation of elusive viral genotypes in vivo. Because recombination has been implicated in immune evasion, the acquisition of drug-resistance mutations, and alterations of viral co-receptor usage, any attempt towards the successful eradication of HIV-1 requires therapeutic approaches targeting tissue macrophages.

The interplay between pathology and HIV expansion in brain tissues has not been thoroughly assessed in the HAART era. HIV-associated dementia (HAD) is marked by progressive brain infection due to recruitment and migration of macrophages in brain tissues; however, the cellular and viral events occurring prior to HAD development and death are under debate. In this study 66 brain tissues from 11 autopsies were analyzed to assess HIV-1 DNA concentration in brain tissues. In most patients without HAD, it was impossible to amplify HIV-1 from brain tissues. Amplifiable DNA was obtained from three cases of patients on HAART who died due to primary pathology other than HAD: 1) cardiovascular disease, a disease associated with HAART therapy, 2) bacterial infections, including Mycobacterium avium complex, rapid occurrence of extreme dementia and, 3) AIDS-related lymphoma with meningeal involvement. HIV-1 DNA was also amplified from multiple tissues of two HAD patients. Analysis of HIV-1 nef, gp120 and gp41 sequences showed reduced viral evolution within brain tissues for the non-HAD cases relative to patients with clinical and histological HAD. The present study is the first to show a potential correlation between HIV-1 evolutionary patterns in the brain and different neuropathologies.

Transcription factors are key regulatory elements that control gene expression. Recognition of transcription factor binding site (TFBS) motifs in the upstream region of coexpressed genes is therefore critical towards a true understanding of the regulations of gene expression. The task of discovering eukaryotic TFBSs remains a challenging problem. Here, we demonstrate that evolutionary computation can be used to search for TFBSs in upstream regions of genes known to be coexpressed. Evolutionary computation was used to search for TFBSs of genes regulated by octamer-binding factor and nuclear factor kappa B. The discovered binding sites included experimentally determined known binding motifs as well as lists of putative, previously unknown TFBSs. We believe that this method to search nucleotide sequence information efficiently for similar motifs will be useful for discovering TFBSs that affect gene regulation.