Antiretroviral drug treatments and vaccine strategies are hampered by the ability of the HIV to generate variants able to evade their protective effects. Understanding the effects of these interventions on virus evolution could aid in the design of targeted antiviral strategies. We addressed this in a cohort of SIV infected non-human primates given short-term antiviral drug treatment (ART) with and without DNA vaccinations. We hypothesized that the most potent therapies (e.g. those that suppress virus burden to the greatest degree) would limit virus evolution. Our results supported this hypothesis. There was no apparent vaccine effect however. These results could indicate that the immune response was not strong enough to induce changes in the global virus population, evolution must be monitored at the epitope level to be revealed, or the most informative time points were unavailable due to low virus burdens. We additionally hypothesized that infection of the gut associated lymphoid tissue may render this organ as a reservoir for expression of unique viral genotypes. We demonstrated that high plasma virus loads were associated with high tissue virus loads and wide dissemination of genotypes. In contrast, the lymphoid tissues on animlals that controlled their virus burden contained genotypes not expressed in other organs. Our results have important implications on studying virus evolution in vivo by demonstrating that large populations and potentially numerous virus genes need to be analyzed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-12132006-182005 |
| Date | 05 January 2007 |
| Creators | Taber, Rachel |
| Contributors | Michael Murphey-Corb, Ph.D., Neal A. DeLuca, Ph.D., Angus W. Thomson, Ph.D., D.Sc., Simon M. Barratt-Boyes, D.V.M, Ph.D., JoAnne L. Flynn |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-12132006-182005/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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