Nature Medicine
6, 71 - 75 (2000)
doi:10.1038/71563
Gender differences in HIV-1 diversity at time of infectionE. Michelle Long1, 2, 3, Harold L. Martin Jr.4, Joan K. Kreiss4, Stephanie M.J. Rainwater1, 3, Ludo Lavreys4, Denis J. Jackson4, 5, Joel Rakwar5, Kishorchandra Mandaliya6
& Julie Overbaugh1, 31
Division of Human Biology, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Center, Seattle, Washington, USA
2
Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, University
of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
3
Departments of Microbiology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington USA
4
Medicine and Epidemiology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington USA
5
Department of Medical Microbiology, University of Nairobi, Nairobi, Kenya
6
Coast Provincial General Hospital, Mombasa, Kenya
Correspondence should be addressed to Julie Overbaugh joverbau@fhcrc.orgTo develop an HIV-1 vaccine with global efficacy, it is important to identify
and characterize the viruses that are transmitted, particularly to individuals
living in areas of high incidence. Several studies have shown that virus from
the blood of acutely infected adults was homogeneous, even when the virus
population in the index case was genetically diverse1,
2,
3,
4.
In contrast to those results with mainly male cohorts in America and Europe,
in several cases a heterogeneous virus population has been found early in
infection in women in Africa5,
6. Thus, we more closely compared
the diversity of transmitted HIV-1 in men and women who became infected through
heterosexual contact. We found that women from Kenya were often infected by
multiple virus variants, whereas men from Kenya were not. Moreover, a heterogeneous
virus was present in the women before their seroconversion, and in each woman
it was derived from a single index case, indicating that diversity was most
likely to be the result of transmission of multiple variants. Our data indicate
that there are important differences in the transmitted virus populations
in women and men, even when cohorts from the same geographic region who are
infected with the same subtypes of HIV-1 are compared.
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