Evolution during primary HIV infection does not require adaptive immune selection.

ABSTRACT: Modern HIV research depends crucially on both viral sequencing and population measurements. To directly link mechanistic biological processes and evolutionary dynamics during HIV infection, we developed multiple within-host phylodynamic models of HIV primary infection for comparative validation against viral load and evolutionary dynamics data. The optimal model of primary infection required no positive selection, suggesting that the host adaptive immune system reduces viral load but surprisingly does not drive observed viral evolution. Rather, the fitness (infectivity) of mutant variants is drawn from an exponential distribution in which most variants are slightly less infectious than their parents (nearly neutral evolution). This distribution was not largely different from either in vivo

SUBMITTER: Swan DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8851487 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature