Inhibition of p38 MAPK reduces the induction of CCL5 by HIV-1 Tat.

<p>(A–D) SVGA astrocytes were pretreated with 10 µM of p-38 MAPK chemical inhibitor (SB203580) or JNK MAPK chemical inhibitor (SP600125) 1 h prior to the transfection with Tat plasmid. (E, F) For gene knockdown with siRNA, the cells were transfected with siRNA against p38α, p38β, p38γ or p38δ before transfecting with HIV-1 Tat plasmid as mentioned in the Materials and Methods. The expression of CCL5 at the mRNA and protein levels were measured at 6 h and 48 h post-transfection by using RT-PCR (A,C,E) and multiplex cytokine assay (B,D,F), respectively. The values represented for mRNA are expressed relative to the mock-transfected controls. Each experiment was performed in triplicate and each bar in the figure represents the mean ± SE of three individual experiments. One-way ANOVA was used to perform the statistical analysis and ** denotes p-value ≤0.01.