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Updated: Dec 15, 2025

Amplifying and Quantifying HIV-1 RNA in HIV Infected Individuals with Viral Loads Below the Limit of Detection by Standard Clinical Assays
Published on: September 26, 2011
Number of HIV-1 founder variants is determined by the recency of the source partner infection
Ch Julián Villabona-Arenas1,2, Matthew Hall3, Katrina A Lythgoe3
1Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Faculty of Epidemiology and Population Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK.
Abstract:
During sexual transmission, the high genetic diversity of HIV-1 within an individual is frequently reduced to one founder variant that initiates infection. Understanding the drivers of this bottleneck is crucial to developing effective infection control strategies. Little is known about the importance of the source partner during this bottleneck. To test the hypothesis that the source partner affects the number of HIV founder variants, we developed a phylodynamic model calibrated using genetic and epidemiological data on all existing transmission pairs for whom the direction of transmission and the infection stage of the source partner are known. Our results suggest that acquiring infection from someone in the acute (early) stage of infection increases the risk of multiple-founder variant transmission compared with acquiring infection from someone in the chronic (later) stage of infection. This study provides the first direct test of source partner characteristics to explain the low frequency of multiple-founder strain infections.
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