Medical Neurobiology Commons^™

Direct Demonstration Of Retroviral Recombination In A Rhesus Monkey, Dawn P. Wooley, Randall A. Smith, Susan Czajak, Ronald C. Desrosiers

Neuroscience, Cell Biology & Physiology Faculty Publications

Recombination may be an important mechanism for increasing variation in retroviral populations. Retroviral recombination has been demonstrated in tissue culture systems by artificially creating doubly infected cells. Evidence for retroviral recombination in vivo is indirect and is based principally on the identification of apparently mosaic human immunodeficiency virus type 1 genomes from phylogenetic analyses of viral sequences. We infected a rhesus monkey with two different molecularly cloned strains of simian immunodeficiency virus. One strain of virus had a deletion in vpx and vpr, and the other strain had a deletion in nef. Each strain on its own induced low virus …