About the Authors

MariaPia De Pasquale

Contributed equally to this work with: MariaPia De Pasquale, Yordanka Kourteva

Affiliation Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Yordanka Kourteva

Contributed equally to this work with: MariaPia De Pasquale, Yordanka Kourteva

Affiliation Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Tara Allos

Affiliation Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, United States of America

Richard T. D'Aquila

richard.daquila@northwestern.edu

Affiliation Division of Infectious Diseases and Northwestern HIV Translational Research Center, Department of Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America

Competing Interests

The authors have the following potential appearances of conflict of interest related to funding that ended in 2012. The authors received an investigator--initiated grant from Merck, which supported some of this research (and is listed under financial nformation). The authors also previously held an investigator--initiated grant from Janssen Diagnostics on a different, unrelated research topic; Janssen support did not contribute to the research described in this submission. MDP requested and received free reagents (Viro--Adembeads) from the manufacturer (Ademtech, Pessac, France) that were used in this research. This does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: MDP YK RTD. Performed the experiments: MDP YK TA. Analyzed the data: MDP YK TA RTD. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MDP YK TA RTD. Wrote the paper: MDP YK TA RTD. Obtained reagents from other sources: MDP.