一项研究提出，一个人的生殖道内占主流的HIV-1毒株可能不是在性伙伴身上建立感染的毒株。
此前的研究发现了感染艾滋病病毒的人们的生殖道内有一批病毒毒株，但是在异性性传播过程中的导致感染的毒株—这是全世界感染的主要模式—常常仍然没有得到确定。
Eric Hunter及其同事获得了卢旺达和赞比亚的8个异性恋伴侣的阴道拭纸、精液和血样，当时新近被感染的伙伴被诊断出了艾滋病病毒阳性。
在8例感染中，6例涉及了女性到男性的传播。这组作者对这种病毒的外壳蛋白进行了测序，结果发现传播艾滋病病毒的伙伴的生殖道内的一种遗传变种很可能导致了对方的感染。
然而，这组作者报告说，造成感染的毒株不是长期感染艾滋病病毒的传播伙伴的生殖道内部最常见的毒株，这提示这种病毒的生殖传染病不是随机发生的。
相反，这组作者提出，适合传播的毒株可能被选择出来帮助这种病毒传播给新的宿主。这组作者说，尽管几乎不可能确定在传播发生的时候病毒毒株在生殖道内的准确分布，这些发现可能有助于改善着眼于制止这种病毒传播的策略。(生物谷 Bioon.com)
doi:10.1073/pnas.1103764108
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Role of donor genital tract HIV-1 diversity in the transmission bottleneck
Debrah I. Boeras, Peter T. Hraber, Mackenzie Hurlston, Tammy Evans-Strickfaden, Tanmoy Bhattacharya, Elena E. Giorgi, Joseph Mulenga, Etienne Karita, Bette T. Korber, Susan Allen, Clyde E. Hart, Cynthia A. Derdeyn, and Eric Hunter
The predominant mode of HIV-1 infection is heterosexual transmission, where a genetic bottleneck is imposed on the virus quasispecies. To probe whether limited genetic diversity in the genital tract (GT) of the transmitting partner drives this bottleneck, viral envelope sequences from the blood and genital fluids of eight transmission pairs from Rwanda and Zambia were analyzed. The chronically infected transmitting partner's virus population was heterogeneous with distinct genital subpopulations, and the virus populations within the GT of two of four women sampled longitudinally exhibited evidence of stability over time intervals on the order of weeks to months. Surprisingly, the transmitted founder variant was not derived from the predominant GT subpopulations. Rather, in each case, the transmitting variant was phylogenetically distinct from the sampled locally replicating population. Although the exact distribution of the virus population present in the GT at the time of transmission cannot be unambiguously defined in these human studies, it is unlikely, based on these data, that the transmission bottleneck is driven in every case by limited viral diversity in the donor GT or that HIV transmission is solely a stochastic event.
