Development of techniques to analyse the formation of HIV provirus in primary human macrophages.

The formation of provirus is an important early event in the life cycle of a retrovirus. We describe a system using PCR for the analysis of this process in primary human macrophages infected in vitro with HIV. We show that products of the first template switch can be detected within 8 h after infection at low multiplicity. The methods described provide a rapid assay of infection with HIV and can be applied in the investigation of a number of aspects of HIV replication in macrophages.