AEGiS-1IAC: GENOMIC DIVERSITY OF THE AIDS VIRUS, HTLV-III

1st International AIDS Conference

Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. - April 14-17, 1985

GENOMIC DIVERSITY OF THE AIDS VIRUS, HTLV-III

Int Conf AIDS. 1985 Apr 14-17;1:27 Abstract No. S9A

GM Shaw, BH Hahn, SZ Salahuddin, P Markham, M Popovic, RC Gallo, and F. Wong-Staal.
National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland.

Early studies of the AIDS virus, HTLV-III. suggested that isolates from different individuals exhibit substantial genomic heterogeneity (Science. 1984 Dec 7;226(4679):1165-71.). We therefore examined by Southern blot analysis the extent of genomic diversity in 16 isolates of HTLV-III from patients with either AIDS (7) , AIDS-related complex (8), or no clinical disease (1). Each of the 16 isolates examined were, overall, highly related to each other and to a cloned prototype of HTLV-III, since their entire genomic complement hybridized to this probe at high stringency (Tm -23 °C). However, each of the 16 HTLV-III isolates could be distinguished from the prototype and from each other by differences in their restriction cleavage patterns which ranged from 1 change in 19 sites tested to 20 changes in 31 sites. Although from most patients we were able to culture only single viral isolates, from one patient we cultured two distinct HTLV-III isolates which differed from each other in a number of restriction sites. These two viruses were cultured from this patient on four different occasions over a period of 2 months. Finally, HTLV-III DNA from lymph node, spleen, and brain of a patient with AIDS was found to be identical in 12 of 12 sites. We conclude that: (1) genomic diversity is a characteristic feature of HTLV-III and occurs to varying degrees in different viral isolates, (ii) a single patient can be infected with more than one form of the virus simultaneously, and (iii) no particular restriction cleavage pattern could be correlated with a particular disease state (e.g., AIDS, ARC, or healthy carrier state).

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S9A