Ribeiro R M, Bonhoeffer S, Nowak M A
Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, UK.
AIDS. 1998 Mar 26;12(5):461-5. doi: 10.1097/00002030-199805000-00006.
To calculate the expected prevalence of resistant HIV mutants before antiviral therapy.
HIV replication generates virus mutants. The prevalence of these mutants is determined by mutation and selection/fitness. Some mutations will confer drug resistance and it is crucial for the success of antiviral drug therapy to determine whether these resistant viruses are present before the initiation of therapy.
A quasispecies equation was used to calculate the expected frequency of drug-resistant virus prior to therapy.
We show how the pretreatment frequency of resistant virus depends on the number of point mutations between wild-type and mutant virus, the selective disadvantage of the resistant mutant and the intermediate mutants, and the mutation rate.
