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AIDS

Prehistory of HIV-1

Nature volume 455, pages 605–606 (2008)Cite this article

The origin of the current AIDS pandemic has been a subject of great interest and speculation. Viral archaeology sheds light on the geography and timescale of the early diversification of HIV-1 in humans.

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) must have been spreading through the human population long before AIDS was first described in 1981, but very few strains from this 'prehistoric' period (pre-1980s) have been characterized. Viral sequences from earlier times can provide insight into the early spread of HIV-1, because the rapid rate of evolution of this virus — up to a million times faster than that of animal DNA — means that substantial amounts of sequence change occur in a matter of decades1. On page 661 of this issue, Worobey et al.2 describe the sequences of partial genome fragments of HIV-1 from a lymph-node biopsy collected in 1960 in Léopoldville (now Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo). They compare these sequences with those of other HIV-1 strains, shedding light on the early evolution and diversification of this virus in Africa.

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Figure 1: Origin of pandemic HIV-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Paul M. Sharp is at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3JT, UK. paul.sharp@ed.ac.uk ,

    Paul M. Sharp

  2. Beatrice H. Hahn is in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama 35294, USA. bhahn@uab.edu,

    Beatrice H. Hahn

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  1. Paul M. Sharp
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  2. Beatrice H. Hahn
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Sharp, P., Hahn, B. Prehistory of HIV-1. Nature 455, 605–606 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/455605a

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