RNA Sequencing of Novel HIV RNA TAR-gag and Host Genome of EVs from HIV-1 Infected Cells

We performed a 3' RACE of a novel HIV RNA TAR-gag in order to determine the sequence of the RNA at the 3' end. Our data had shown that TAR-gag was potentially a noncoding RNA and our hypothesis was that TAR-gag ended somewhere prior to the end of the gag region of the HIV genome. The 3' RACE experiment showed that TAR-gag actually consists of four different RNA clusters, the longest of which ends at 615 bases from the transcription start site; this is in the middle of the p17 region of the gag gene. In addition, we sequenced all host RNAs in the EVs. RNA from J1.1 and U1 exosomes was isolated and converted to cDNA. Sequencing libraries of the cDNA were made and a 3' RACE was perforemed to determine how long TAR-gag RNA is. Please note that the clustering analysis (published in PMID 28536264) was done only on the unfragmented samples (i.e. *-U samples).