HIV: from chimps to humans

HIV-1 strains in humans arose from three independent ape-to-human transmissions in the early 20th century, but the viral adaptation in humans remained unknown until now. Paul Sharp and colleagues from the University of Nottingham Queens Medical Centre in England compared full-length genome sequences of chimpanzee HIV strains with inferred ancestral sequences for three different phylogenetic HIV-1 groups in humans: M, N and O. They found that cross-species transmission in all three groups may have occurred through mutations of a single amino acid in the gag-30 (p17) residue of HIV.1


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