Fig. 3: KRT72 restricts wild-type HIV-1 infection in resting CD4⁺ T cells.

a–e KRT72 suppresses HIV-1 late RT and 2-LTR circular DNA levels in resting CD4⁺ T cells. Resting CD4⁺ T cells were electroporated with KRT72 or control siRNA. Twenty-four hours after electroporation, cells were spinoculated with HIV-1_NL4-3 with or without EFV (300 nM). At 48 hpi, cells were analyzed by flow cytometry (a). FACS data are the mean ± SEM of three independent donors (b). Western blotting assessed KRT72, SAMHD1, and GAPDH protein levels using specific antibodies (c). At 24, 48, 72, and 96 hpi, genomic and circular viral DNA was extracted for qPCR to assess late RT (d) and 2-LTR circular DNA (e), respectively. Data are the mean ± standard deviation (SD) of three triplicates and are representative of three independent experiments. ***P < 0.001; **P < 0.01; *P < 0.05 (two-tailed, unpaired Student’s t-test), and P-values are 0.009, 0.003, 0.0044 respectively. f–j Resting CD4⁺ T cells were electroporated with siRNAs for KRT72 or control with or without an untagged KRT72 expression vector. Twenty-four hours after electroporation, cells were spinoculated with HIV-1_NL4-3 with or without EFV (300 nM). At 2 dpi, cells were analyzed by flow cytometry (f). FACS data are the mean ± SEM of three independent donors (g). Genomic and circular viral DNA was extracted for qPCR to evaluate later RT (h) and 2-LTR circular DNA (i), respectively. Data are the mean ± SEM of three independent donors. ***P < 0.001; **P < 0.01; *P < 0.05; n.s. (two-tailed, unpaired Student’s t-test), and P-values are 0.0385, 0.0003, 0.0003, 0.0002, 0.0092, 0.0082, 0.0003, respectively. Western blotting assessed KRT72, SAMHD1, and GAPDH protein levels using specific antibodies (j). Western blotting data are representative of three independent experiments. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.