Related Experiment Video
Updated: Aug 15, 2026

Pairwise Growth Competition Assay for Determining the Replication Fitness of Human Immunodeficiency Viruses
Published on: May 4, 2015
A genetic-algorithm approach to simulating human immunodeficiency virus evolution reveals the strong impact of
Gennady Bocharov1,2, Neville J Ford1, John Edwards1
1Department of Mathematics, University of Chester, Chester, UK.
Abstract:
It has been previously shown that the majority of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1)-infected splenocytes can harbour multiple, divergent proviruses with a copy number ranging from one to eight. This implies that, besides point mutations, recombination should be considered as an important mechanism in the evolution of HIV within an infected host. To explore in detail the possible contributions of multi-infection and recombination to HIV evolution, the effects of major microscopic parameters of HIV replication (i.e. the point-mutation rate, the crossover number, the recombination rate and the provirus copy number) on macroscopic characteristics (such as the Hamming distance and the abundance of n-point mutants) have been simulated in silico. Simulations predict that multiple provirus copies per infected cell and recombination act in synergy to speed up the development of sequence diversity. Point mutations can be fixed for some time without fitness selection. The time needed for the selection of multiple mutations with increased fitness is highly variable, supporting the view that stochastic processes may contribute substantially to the kinetics of HIV variation in vivo.
More Related Videos
14:23A Restriction Enzyme Based Cloning Method to Assess the In vitro Replication Capacity of HIV-1 Subtype C Gag-MJ4 Chimeric Viruses
Published on: August 31, 2014
13:13Single-cell Quantitation of mRNA and Surface Protein Expression in Simian Immunodeficiency Virus-infected CD4+ T Cells Isolated from Rhesus macaques
Published on: September 25, 2018
Related Concept Videos
Viral Recombination
Viral Mutations
Retrovirus Life Cycles
Size and Structure of Viral Genomes
Retroviruses