Open AccessPoster presentation Human miRNAs: an antiviral defense mechanism

miRNAs are short 21-24 nt RNAs that mediate post tran-scriptional repression of target genes. Various reports have shown that miRNAs are capable of repressing the gene expression levels of different viruses, leading to the sug-gestion that miRNAs are key mediators of host-virus inter-action [1]. HIV-1 is a retrovirus known to cause AIDS, one of the major diseases in humans. The nef gene of the HIV-1 has been shown to be important for virus repression of CD4+ cells and virus progression. It has also been shown earlier that patients infected with nef deleted HIV-1 do not progress from infected to diseased state for longer periods of time, resulting in the Long Term Non-Progressor phe-notype [2]. Materials and methods We computationally predicted five endogenousl