Dating the age of the SIV lineages that gave rise to HIV-1 and HIV-2.

ABSTRACT: Great strides have been made in understanding the evolutionary history of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) and the zoonoses that gave rise to HIV-1 and HIV-2. What remains unknown is how long these SIVs had been circulating in non-human primates before the transmissions to humans. Here, we use relaxed molecular clock dating techniques to estimate the time of most recent common ancestor for the SIVs infecting chimpanzees and sooty mangabeys, the reservoirs of HIV-1 and HIV-2, respectively. The date of the most recent common ancestor of SIV in chimpanzees is estimated to be 1492 (1266-1685), and the date in sooty mangabeys is estimated to be 1809 (1729-1875). Notably, we demonstrate that SIV sequences sampled from sooty mangabeys possess sufficient clock-like signal to calibrate a molecul

SUBMITTER: Wertheim JO 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2669881 | biostudies-literature | 2009 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature