Basic Science Award

Detection of gene expression by flow cytometry is currently limited to transcripts that are abundantly expressed, however the recently reported RNAscope technology offers greatly improved sensitivity and specificity and has the potential to change the approach to single-cell transcript measurements that currently require low sensitivity approaches and are extremely low throughput. As yet these probes have not been utilized for study of patient samples by flow cytometry. We will therefore test the ability of RNAscope probes to detect HIV gag RNA transcripts in individual cells from HIV infected patients by flow cytometry. This assay would have tremendous benefit to the study of HIV persistence and would be a first step in offering this technology to our core users.