Previous studies have reported that DDX58 (encoding RIG-I) and IFIH1 (encoding MDA5) are ubiquitously expressed and work as the sensors for viral double stranded RNA in various cell lineages (reviewed in Barral et al., 2009), while CGAS plays a pivotal role in sensing HIV-1 infection in myeloid cells by detecting reverse transcribed viral DNA (Ma et al., 2015). This evidence concerns the gene IFIH1 and HIV-1 infection.