Last week in Nature Communications, Bohn-Wippert et al., provide the first understanding of how the HIV virus is capable of regulating the migration of its own host cell. Computation and experiments show high promoter similarity between virus and host, co-regulation, co-expression, and coupled reactivation of latent HIV with host cell migration. The findings reveal an additional layer of viral-host interactomes within promoter sequences, well before mRNA and protein interactions occur.