Direct Evidence of Extensive Diversity of HIV-1 in Kinshasa by 1960
By Michael Worobey, Marlea Gemmel, D. Teuwen, Tamara S. Haselkorn, K. Kunstman, M. Bunce, J. Muyembe, Jean-Marie M. Kabongo, R. M. Kalengayi, E. Marck and 2 more. Nature, 2008
670 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) sequences that pre-date the recognition of AIDS are critical to defining the time of origin and the timescale of virus evolution. A viral sequence from 1959 (ZR59) is the oldest known HIV-1 infection. Other historically documented sequences, important calibration points to convert evolutionary distance into time, are lacking, however; ZR59 is the only one sampled before 1976. Here we report the amplification and characterization of viral sequences from a Bouin’s-fixed paraffin-embedded lymph node biopsy specimen obtained in 1960 from an adult female in Léopoldville, Belgian Congo (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)), and we use them to conduct the first comparative evolutionary genetic study of early pre-AIDS epidemic HIV-1 group M viruses. Phylogenetic analyses position this viral sequence (DRC60) closest to the ancestral node of subtype A (excluding A2). Relaxed molecular clock analyses incorporating DRC60 and ZR59 date the most recent common ancestor of the M group to near the beginning of the twentieth century. The sizeable genetic distance between DRC60 and ZR59 directly demonstrates that diversification of HIV-1 in west-central Africa occurred long before the recognized AIDS pandemic. The recovery of viral gene sequences from decades-old paraffin-embedded tissues opens the door to a detailed palaeovirological investigation of the evolutionary history of HIV-1 that is not accessible by other methods.
Subfields: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, Virology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/993620058f55c069288dd2689028ef6462a79e11
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Citations in the corpus
- Viral Phylodynamics (2013, methodology): “HIV-1 sequences sampled over a span of five decades have been used with relaxed molecular clock phylogenetic methods to estimate the time of cross-species viral spillover into humans around the early 20th century [64].”
- Evolutionary analysis of the dynamics of viral infectious disease (2009, result): “These results have been validated and refined by the recovery of genomic fragments from older isolates, notably two 50-year old preserved tissue samples from Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo 15, 16 , which indicate that considerable HIV diversity had accrued there by 1960.”
- The Evolution and Emergence of RNA Viruses (2009, background): “In the case of HIV-1 this means that the virus mostly likely emerged in the Congo region of central-west Africa during the fi rst decades of the twentieth century and fi rst entered human populations through exposure to contaminated bush meat from chimpanzees (Gao et al. 1999; Keele et al. 2006; Wor”