Rodrigo Matus-Nicodemos , Ph.D.

Predoctoral Fellow

Contact: For contact information, search the NIH Enterprise Directory.

Education:

Ph.D., 2022, John Hopkins University
B.A., M.S., Rutgers University

Biography

Rodrigo Matus-Nicodemos’s research addresses how the reservoir of HIV-infected cells is established prior to antiretroviral therapy in HIV+ individuals. His work has found that HIV can directly infect resting memory CD4 T cells, the primary reservoir for HIV under therapy. HIV can infect resting memory CD4 T cells primarily because these cells do have enough levels of dNTPs for HIV reverse transcriptase to convert its RNA genome into the DNA provirus and integrate into the host genome. An important finding of this process is deoxyuracils are incorporated into the provirus instead of thymidines. He also found that HIV-infected resting cells do not make virion but do express mRNAs for its accessory proteins: Nef, Vif, Vpu and Vpr.