title: Identification and characterization of a new class of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 recombinants comprised of two circulating recombinant forms, CRF07_BC and CRF08_BC, in China.
abstract: We identified a new class of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) recombinants (00CN-HH069 and 00CN-HH086) in which further recombination occurred between two established circulating recombinant forms (CRFs). These two isolates were found among 57 HIV-1 samples from a cohort of injecting drug users in eastern Yunnan Province of China. Informative-site analysis in conjunction with bootscanning plots and exploratory tree analysis revealed that these two strains were closely related mosaics comprised of CRF07_BC and CRF08_BC, which are found in China. The genotype screening based on gag-reverse transcriptase sequences of 57 samples from eastern Yunnan identified 47 CRF08_BC specimens (82.5%), 5 CRF07_BC specimens (8.8%), and 3 additional specimens with the novel recombinant structure. These new "second-generation" recombinants thus constitute a substantial proportion (5 of 57; 8.8%) of HIV-1 strains in this population and may belong to a new but yet-undefined class of CRF. This might be the first example of CRFs recombining with each other, leading to the evolution of second-generation inter-CRF recombinants.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Molecular Virology and Epidemiology, AIDS Research Center, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-8640, Japan.
authors.forename: Rongge
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Shigeru
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Kusagawa
authors.forename: Chiyu
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Xueshan
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Xia
authors.forename: Kunlong
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Ben
authors.forename: Yutaka
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Takebe
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D005838:Genotype; D015497:HIV-1 / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics*; D006801:Humans; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D011995:Recombination, Genetic; D014766:Viremia / Q000821:virology*