Andresen Betina S, Vinner Lasse, Tang Sheila, Bragstad Karoline, Kronborg Gitte, Gerstoft Jan, Corbet Sylvie, Fomsgaard Anders
Department of Virology, Statens Serum Institut, Copenhagen, Denmark.
AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses. 2007 Nov;23(11):1442-8. doi: 10.1089/aid.2007.0111.
We report here the near full-length sequence characterization of 17 Danish clinical HIV-1 strains isolated from HLA-A02 patients not in need of ART, with relatively low viral loads and normal CD4 cell counts. Sequencing was performed directly on DNA extracted from short-term cocultures of PBMCs. The near full-length genomes did not contain any major insertions, deletions, or rearrangements. Sixteen of the isolates were characterized as nonrecombinant subtype B and one isolate as nonrecombinant subtype C. Phylogenetic analysis did not reveal any founder effect among the sequences. Also, we investigated the presence of infrequently targeted subdominant HLA-A02-binding CTL epitopes. The epitopes were conserved in the Danish strains as well as globally in reference sequences of all subtypes. Thus, the selected epitopes were not subtype-specific or region-specific. This lends support for the concept of a universal immunotherapeutic vaccine construct based on these epitopes.