Expression Analysis of Cellular Mir-29a and mir-29b in HIV Positive Patients

Background and Objective: Various cellular factors affect the process of HIV activity. One of these cellular factors are structures known as microRN that are expected to be involved in controlling HIV replication and infectivity. The expression of one or a set of them may represent the patient s clinical conditions. In this study, the expression of miR-29a and miR-29b involved in regulating viral genes rsquo; expression was evaluated in three HIVpositive groups and a healthy control group. Later, the expression level of these microRNAs was compared between the cases and controls. Methods: Total RNA extraction was performed on the collected samples using RNxplus kit and then the microRNA expression levels were evaluated using Relative Realtime PCR. The obtained data was entered into SPSS 22 and Graphpad softwares and analyzed using KruskalWallis and ManWhitney tests. Pvalue of less than 0.05 was considered as statistical significance level. Results: The expression level of miR-29a was reduced in patients under treatment and drugresistant patients ( P ≤0.05) . All three HIVpositive groups including people without drug treatment, patients under treatment and drugresistant patients showed reduced miR-29b expression level compared to control group (P ≤0.05). Conclusion: the decreased expression of miR-29a and miR-29b in patients under treatment and drugresistant patients indicates an increased viral replication and reduced CD4 cell count. It may be possible to predict the progression of the disease by miRNA measurement or control viral replication using these mirR-NAs that requires further studies.