Enhancement of HIV-1 marker detection in cell cultures treated with mild heat-shock.

Rapid exposure to supra-optimal temperature (heat-shock) and a variety of other treatments are able to induce changes in cellular translational and transcriptional activity referred to as "the heat-shock response". The effect of heat-shock was investigated in H9 lymphoblastic cells and in peripheral blood lymphocytes infected with human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1). The results showed that a mild heat-shock performed either immediately before infection or 7 days after infection consistently increased the recovery of p24 core antigen and reverse transcriptase activity in the supernatants of experimentally infected cell cultures. On the contrary, heat-shock had no effect on the HIV-1 marker recovery from persistently infected H9/HTLV-III cell cultures.