Conference highlights of the 15th international conference on human retrovirology: HTLV and related retroviruses, 4-8 june 2011, Leuven, Gembloux, Belgium

The June 2011 15th International Conference on Human Retrovirology: HTLV and Related Viruses marks approximately 30 years since the discovery of HTLV-1. As anticipated, a large number of abstracts were submitted and presented by scientists, new and old to the field of retrovirology, from all five continents. The aim of this review is to distribute the scientific highlights of the presentations as analysed and represented by experts in specific fields of epidemiology, clinical research, immunology, animal models, molecular and cellular biology, and virology

HMGA1 recruits CTIP2-repressed P-TEFb to the HIV-1 and cellular target promoters

International audienceActive positive transcription elongation factor b (P-TEFb) is essential for cellular and human im-munodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) transcription elongation. CTIP2 represses P-TEFb activity in a complex containing 7SK RNA and HEXIM1. Recently, the inactive 7SK/P-TEFb small nuclear RNP (snRNP) has been detected at the HIV-1 core promoter as well as at the promoters of cellular genes, but a recruiting mechanism still remains unknown to date. Here we show global synergy between CTIP2 and the 7SK-binding chromatin master-regulator HMGA1 in terms of P-TEFb– dependent endogenous and HIV-1 gene expression regulation. While CTIP2 and HMGA1 concordingly repress the expression of cellular 7SK-dependent P-TEFb targets, the simultaneous knock-down of CTIP2 and HMGA1 also results in a boost in Tat-dependent and independent HIV-1 promoter activity. Chromatin immunoprecipitation experiments reveal a significant loss of CTIP2/7SK/P-TEFb snRNP recruitment to cellular gene promoters and the HIV-1 promoter on HMGA1 knock-down. Our findings not only provide insights into a recruiting mechanism for the inactive 7SK/P-TEFb snRNP, but may also contribute to a better understanding of viral latency

Cultural Domains and Class Structure: Assessing Homologies and Cultural Legitimacy

International audienceIt is well known that the figures representing the French social space in Distinction (Bourdieu 1979) are based on several partial analyses. This means that one of Pierre Bourdieu’s central hypotheses – the structural homology between social and cultural spaces as wholes – was not empirically tested by way of correspondence analysis (although Bourdieu did perform such an analysis for the bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie). Furthermore, many of the sociological discussions of cultural practices which have appeared since the publishing of Distinction use data describing a single taste domain, often music. This is beginning to change, as large-scale surveys have been conducted for Australia (Bennett et al. 1999), Norway (Rosenlund 2000), Porto in Portugal (Borges Pereira 2005), Aalborg in Denmark (Prieur et al. 2008), Great Britain (Bennett et al. 2009) – but not for France. Furthermore, as it has never been empirically tested, it is not obvious that cultural tastes constitute a homogeneous universe of practices. They can be structured by domains, depending on the relative autonomy of their respective fields of production: taste in music is not necessarily distributed in the same way as taste in books, and their relation to the social space may also differ. The French survey on cultural practices Pratiques culturelles des Français (PCF 2008), enables new implementations and tests of these hypotheses through empirical analysis