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. 2014 May 8;10(5):e1004092.
doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1004092. eCollection 2014 May.

Cellular superspreaders: an epidemiological perspective on HIV infection inside the body

Kristina Talbert-Slagle  1 , Katherine E Atkins  2 , Koon-Kiu Yan  3 , Ekta Khurana  3 , Mark Gerstein  3 , Elizabeth H Bradley  1 , David Berg  4 , Alison P Galvani  2 , Jeffrey P Townsend  2
Affiliations

Cellular superspreaders: an epidemiological perspective on HIV infection inside the body

Kristina Talbert-Slagle et al. PLoS Pathog. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Contact tracing of SARS in Singapore showed that most people (gray circles) transmitted the virus to very few others, while a few individuals acted as “superspreaders,” infecting many more people than average.
Patient numbers corresponding to those individuals who were identified as superspreaders are shown. All cases trace back to patient 1 .
Figure 2
Figure 2. Heterogeneity among CD4+ T cells in the genital mucosa and the HIV founder strain.
(A) The majority of CD4+ T cells in the female genital mucosa of an uninfected individual are resting cells; rare cells are activated. (B) Most virus particles remain trapped in the mucus that coats the cervical epithelium though a few can enter through microabrasions. Resting CD4+ T cells can become infected with HIV but do not produce infectious virus. Infection of activated CD4+ T cells, which tend to form clusters, have higher levels of gene expression than resting cells, and produce infectious virus, may be the superspreading event that establishes the HIV founder strain after sexual transmission. ICRN: individual cellular reproductive number. Based on data from references and . Images of cervical epithelium by OpenStax College [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)] via Wikimedia Commons.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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