Figure 6

EGCG effectively inhibits semen-enhanced viral infection of autologous virus/semen and R5- as well as X4-tropic viruses. A) Semen samples from a healthy donor and an HIV-1-positive patient with high viremia were preincubated in presence or absence of 0.4 mM EGCG and subjected to the infection assay as described in the methods section. Semen was used undiluted during preincubation. Columns represent luciferase activity minus background (luciferase activity in control experiments performed without semen) expressed as RLU/s*1000. Error bars represent the standard error of the means. The indicated p-values result from unpaired, two-tailed Student's t-test analysis. Significantly higher luciferase activity in cells incubated with semen from the HIV-patient than in cells incubated with semen from the healthy donor demonstrates successful infection. B) To analyze semen-mediated enhancement of HIV-1 infectivity and its inhibition by EGCG with regards to different virus strains, three different HIV-1 strains were deployed: BaL (R5-tropic), NL4/3 (X4-tropic) and a primary HIV-1B isolate. Four individual semen samples were subjected to the infection assay described above in presence or absence of 0.4 mM EGCG.