Researchers are shaking up the HIV family tree again. For the first time, investigators have found what looks like a gorilla version of the AIDS virus in a person.
Researchers are shaking up the HIV family tree again. For the first time, investigators have found what looks like a gorilla version of the AIDS virus in a person. They do not know how the woman became infected but suspect that other humans harbor a similar virus. The possibility that gorillas can transmit the virus to humans further underscores the danger of butchering the apes or keeping them as pets, which still occurs in some African communities.
Several studies have shown that the most common form of the human immunodeficiency virus, dubbed HIV-1, likely evolved from a chimpanzee relative, SIVcpz. When investigators reported 3 years ago that they had found a similar SIV, SIVgor, in gorillas living in Cameroon, a genetic analysis suggested that it, too, descended from SIVcpz. Now the finding of SIVgor in a Cameroonian woman who moved to France 5 years ago further complicates the story.
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In a paper published online this week in Nature Medicine, virologist Jean-Christophe Plantier of the Université de Rouen in France and colleagues describe how a 62-year-old suffering from fevers and weight loss sought medical care shortly after arriving in Paris. The woman tested positive for HIV antibodies and had suffered some damage to her immune cells but had not developed AIDS. Plantier's lab, however, could not make copies of her virus, a standard diagnostic step in wealthier countries that quantifies how much HIV a person has in the blood. He and his collaborators eventually succeeded by using novel reagents designed to sequence unusual HIV strains. The virus they found was most closely related to SIVgor. "I was very surprised to find SIVgor in the human population," says the paper's senior author, François Simon, a virologist at Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris.
