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Relation of HTLV-4 to simian and human immunodeficiency-associated viruses

Abstract

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) is the aetiologic agent of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) in most countries1–3 and probably originated in Central Africa like the AIDS epidemic itself. Evidence for a second major group of human immunodeficiency-associated retroviruses came from a report that West African human populations4 like wild-caught African green monkeys5 had serum antibodies that reacted more strongly with a simian immunodeficiency virus (STLV-3Mac) (ref. 6) than with HIV-1. Novel T-lymphotropic retroviruses were reported to have been isolated from healthy Senegalese West Africans (HTLV-4) (ref. 4) and from African green monkeys (STLV-3AGM) (ref. 7), and a different retrovirus (HIV-2) was identified in other West African AIDS patients8. Genomic analysis of HIV-2 clearly distinguished it from STLV-3 (ref. 9), but restriction enzyme site-mapping of three different HTLV-4 isolates and six different STLV-3AGM isolates showed them to be essentially indistinguishable10–12. In this report we clone, restriction map, and partially sequence three isolates of HTLV-4 (PK82, PK289, PK190) (ref. 4). We find that these viruses differ in nucleotide sequence from each other and from three isolates of STLV-3AGM (K78, K6W, K1) (ref. 7) by 1% or less. We also report the isolation of a T-lymphotropic retrovirus from the peripheral blood of a healthy Senegalese woman which hybridizes preferentially to HIV-2 specific DNA probes. We conclude that HTLV-4 (ref. 4) and STLV-3AGM (ref. 7) are not independent virus isolates and that HIV-2 is present in Senegal as it is in other West African countries13.

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References

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Hahn, B., Kong, L., Lee, SW. et al. Relation of HTLV-4 to simian and human immunodeficiency-associated viruses. Nature 330, 184–186 (1987). https://doi.org/10.1038/330184a0

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