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Title: Recombination enhances HIV-1 envelope diversity by facilitating the survival of latent genomic fragments in the plasma virus population

Journal Article · · PLoS Computational Biology (Online)
 [1];  [2];  [1];  [1];  [1];  [3]
  1. Los Alamos National Lab. (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
  2. The Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
  3. Univ. of Zurich (Switzerland)
+ Show Author Affiliations

HIV-1 is subject to immune pressure exerted by the host, giving variants that escape the immune response an advantage. Virus released from activated latent cells competes against variants that have continually evolved and adapted to host immune pressure. Nevertheless, there is increasing evidence that virus displaying a signal of latency survives in patient plasma despite having reduced fitness due to long-term immune memory. We investigated the survival of virus with latent envelope genomic fragments by simulating within-host HIV-1 sequence evolution and the cycling of viral lineages in and out of the latent reservoir. Our model incorporates a detailed mutation process including nucleotide substitution, recombination, latent reservoir dynamics, diversifying selection pressure driven by the immune response, and purifying selection pressure asserted by deleterious mutations. We evaluated the ability of our model to capture sequence evolution in vivo by comparing our simulated sequences to HIV-1 envelope sequence data from 16 HIV-infected untreated patients. Empirical sequence divergence and diversity measures were qualitatively and quantitatively similar to those of our simulated HIV-1 populations, suggesting that our model invokes realistic trends of HIV-1 genetic evolution. Moreover, reconstructed phylogenies of simulated and patient HIV-1 populations showed similar topological structures. Our simulation results suggest that recombination is a key mechanism facilitating the persistence of virus with latent envelope genomic fragments in the productively infected cell population. Recombination increased the survival probability of latent virus forms approximately 13-fold. Prevalence of virus with latent fragments in productively infected cells was observed in only 2% of simulations when we ignored recombination, while the proportion increased to 27% of simulations when we allowed recombination. We also found that the selection pressures exerted by different fitness landscapes influenced the shape of phylogenies, diversity trends, and survival of virus with latent genomic fragments. Furthermore, our model predicts that the persistence of latent genomic fragments from multiple different ancestral origins increases sequence diversity in plasma for reasonable fitness landscapes.

Research Organization:
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-06NA25396
OSTI ID:
1235898
Report Number(s):
LA-UR-15-21253
Journal Information:
PLoS Computational Biology (Online), Vol. 11, Issue 12; ISSN 1553-7358
Publisher:
Public Library of ScienceCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 12 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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  • F., Salazar-Gonzalez, Jesus; P., Busch, Michael; S., Perelson, Alan
  • The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill University Libraries https://doi.org/10.17615/f6s9-vz03
text January 2008
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Cited By (7)

Relationship between latent and rebound viruses in a clinical trial of anti–HIV-1 antibody 3BNC117 journal August 2018
Analysis of HIV-1 latent reservoir and rebound viruses in a clinical trial of anti-HIV-1 antibody 3BNC117 posted_content May 2018
Inference of Transmission Network Structure from HIV Phylogenetic Trees journal January 2017
Evolution of HIV-1 within untreated individuals and at the population scale in Uganda journal July 2018
Inference of Transmission Network Structure from HIV Phylogenetic Trees posted_content June 2016
Short-Sighted Virus Evolution and a Germline Hypothesis for Chronic Viral Infections journal May 2017
In vitro replicative fitness of early Transmitted founder HIV-1 variants and sensitivity to Interferon alpha journal February 2020

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Related Subjects

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
HIV-1
immune response
viral genomics
viral persistence and latency
viral evolution
viral replication
evolutionary immunology
phylogenetics