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Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Theses/Dissertations

2020

Evolution

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Rates And Patterns Of Indels In Hiv-1 Gp120 Within And Among Hosts, John Lawrence Palmer Aug 2020

Rates And Patterns Of Indels In Hiv-1 Gp120 Within And Among Hosts, John Lawrence Palmer

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Insertions and deletions (indels) in the HIV-1 gp120 variable loops modulate sensitivity to neutralizing antibodies and are therefore implicated in HIV-1 immune escape. However, the rates and characteristics of variable loop indels have not been investigated within hosts. Here, I report a within-host phylogenetic analysis of gp120 variable loop indels, with mentions to my preceding study on these indels among hosts.

We processed longitudinally-sampled gp120 sequences collected from a public database (n = 11,265) and the Novitsky Lab (n=2,541). I generated time-scaled within-host phylogenies using BEAST, extracted indels by reconstructing ancestral sequences in Historian, and estimated variable loop indel rates …


Multi-Scale Evolution Of Virulence Of Hiv-1, David W. Dick Jul 2020

Multi-Scale Evolution Of Virulence Of Hiv-1, David W. Dick

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

HIV-1 is a rapidly replicating retrovirus that faces two distinct fitness landscapes: within-host HIV-1 faces viral competition for host cells and for escape from the immune system, and between hosts HIV-1 faces a transmission bottleneck in which the majority of new infections are started by a single virus strain. Possibly as a result of these conflicting selective pressures, the rate of evolution of HIV-1 tends to be greater within-host than between hosts.

A current hypothesis for this difference in evolutionary rates is that the HIV-1 latent reservoir acts to archive virus for later transmission. We offer a related but complimentary …