A new article recently published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution found that people with higher viral loads also had higher rates of viral recombination. In fact, the more HIV you have in your blood, the easier it is for the virus to diversify.
One of the reasons HIV has historically been so difficult to fight is that the virus has an extremely high recombination rate. Recombination enables the exchange of genetic information between virus strains and promotes the evolution of HIV in humans. This gene exchange causes the virus to evade the immune system and become resistant to many drugs designed to **HIV.
More generally, recombination is an important evolutionary driver that allows organisms to clear disruptive mutations and bind beneficial ones. But scientists don't yet know how the recombination rate of HIV varies throughout the course of infection or between different people. Understanding the factors that influence recombination rates in well-studied systems, such as HIV, can help reveal some of the effects of recombination on evolution more broadly.
An important but understudied step in HIV recombination is coinfection, in which two different viral particles infect the same cell. Despite long-standing interest in HIV recombination, scientists do not yet understand whether changes in co-infection rates lead to changes in recombination rates. While studies of HIV in cell cultures and mice have shown that an increase in co-infection is associated with an increase in recombinant virus, it is unclear whether this effect is found in HIV-infected individuals.
The researchers involved in this study hypothesized that people with higher viral loads (more HIV in their blood) would have more cells infected at the same time, which would result in a higher recombination rate of the virus. To investigate this hypothesis, scientists have developed a new method called Recombination Analysis by Time Series Linkage Decay (RATS-LD) to quantify recombination using genetic associations between mutations over time.
The study found that while the recombination rate of the HIV population with viral load in the bottom third of the dataset was consistent with previous estimates,But the median recombination rate was nearly six times higher in people with viral loads in the top third。In addition, the researchers observed a pattern of simultaneous increases in viral load and effective recombination rate in a single individual.
These results suggest that the incidence of HIV recombination may be even more extreme than researchers previously recognized. In addition to HIV, many organisms, such as bacteria and plants, do not require recombination to reproduce but can benefit from it. To exchange genetic material, these organisms also rely on two different genomes meeting at the same place and time. In addition, the results suggest that population density may affect the effectiveness of recombination in a variety of environments.
Scientists say the recombination rate can depend on the environment and is influenced by many different molecular factors, and population density may be one of the previously underestimated viral factors.
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