Selection in context: patterns of natural selection in the glycoprotein 120 region of human immunodeficiency virus 1 within infected individuals

Antibody selection and amino acid reversions

Pathogens adapt to antibody surveillance through amino acid replacements in targeted protein regions, or epitopes, that interfere with antibody binding. However, such escape mutations may exact a fitness cost due to impaired protein function. Here, it is hypothesized that the recurring generation of specific neutralizing antibodies to an epitope region as it evolves in response to antibody selection will cause amino acid reversions by releasing early escape mutations from immune selection. The plausibility of this hypothesis was tested with stochastic simulation of adaptation at the molecular sequence level in finite populations. Under the conditions of strong selection and weak mutation, the rates of allele fixation and amino acid reversion increased with population size and selection coefficients. These rates decreased with population size, however, if mutation became strong, because clonal interference reduced the rate of adaptation. The model successfully predicts the rate of reversion per allele fixation for an important human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) antibody epitope region. Therefore, antibody selection may generate complex adaptive dynamics.

The evolution of HIV: inferences using phylogenetics

Molecular phylogenetics has revolutionized the study of not only evolution but also disparate fields such as genomics, bioinformatics, epidemiology, ecology, microbiology, molecular biology and biochemistry. Particularly significant are its achievements in population genetics as a result of the development of coalescent theory, which have contributed to more accurate model-based parameter estimation and explicit hypothesis testing. The study of the evolution of many microorganisms, and HIV in particular, have benefited from these new methodologies. HIV is well suited for such sophisticated population analyses because of its large population sizes, short generation times, high substitution rates and relatively small genomes. All these factors make HIV an ideal and fascinating model to study molecular evolution in real time. Here we review the significant advances made in HIV evolution through the application of phylogenetic approaches. We first examine the relative roles of mutation and recombination on the molecular evolution of HIV and its adaptive response to drug therapy and tissue allocation. We then review some of the fundamental questions in HIV evolution in relation to its origin and diversification and describe some of the insights gained using phylogenies. Finally, we show how phylogenetic analysis has advanced our knowledge of HIV dynamics (i.e., phylodynamics).

Has human evolution stopped?

It has been argued that human evolution has stopped because humans now adapt to their environment via cultural evolution and not biological evolution. However, all organisms adapt to their environment, and humans are no exception. Culture defines much of the human environment, so cultural evolution has actually led to adaptive evolution in humans. Examples are given to illustrate the rapid pace of adaptive evolution in response to cultural innovations. These adaptive responses have important implications for infectious diseases, Mendelian genetic diseases, and systemic diseases in current human populations. Moreover, evolution proceeds by mechanisms other than natural selection. The recent growth in human population size has greatly increased the reservoir of mutational variants in the human gene pool, thereby enhancing the potential for human evolution. The increase in human population size coupled with our increased capacity to move across the globe has induced a rapid and ongoing evolutionary shift in how genetic variation is distributed within and among local human populations. In particular, genetic differences between human populations are rapidly diminishing and individual heterozygosity is increasing, with beneficial health effects. Finally, even when cultural evolution eliminates selection on a trait, the trait can still evolve due to natural selection on other traits. Our traits are not isolated, independent units, but rather are integrated into a functional whole, so selection on one trait can cause evolution to occur on another trait, sometimes with mildly maladaptive consequences.

Recombination rate and selection strength in HIV intra-patient evolution

The evolutionary dynamics of HIV during the chronic phase of infection is driven by the host immune response and by selective pressures exerted through drug treatment. To understand and model the evolution of HIV quantitatively, the parameters governing genetic diversification and the strength of selection need to be known. While mutation rates can be measured in single replication cycles, the relevant effective recombination rate depends on the probability of coinfection of a cell with more than one virus and can only be inferred from population data. However, most population genetic estimators for recombination rates assume absence of selection and are hence of limited applicability to HIV, since positive and purifying selection are important in HIV evolution. Yet, little is known about the distribution of selection differentials between individual viruses and the impact of single polymorphisms on viral fitness. Here, we estimate the rate of recombination and the distribution of selection coefficients from time series sequence data tracking the evolution of HIV within single patients. By examining temporal changes in the genetic composition of the population, we estimate the effective recombination to be rho = 1.4+/-0.6 x 10(-5) recombinations per site and generation. Furthermore, we provide evidence that the selection coefficients of at least 15% of the observed non-synonymous polymorphisms exceed 0.8% per generation. These results provide a basis for a more detailed understanding of the evolution of HIV. A particularly interesting case is evolution in response to drug treatment, where recombination can facilitate the rapid acquisition of multiple resistance mutations. With the methods developed here, more precise and more detailed studies will be possible as soon as data with higher time resolution and greater sample sizes are available.

Multiple-infection and recombination in HIV-1 within a longitudinal cohort of women

Background

Recombination between strains of HIV-1 only occurs in individuals with multiple infections, and the incidence of recombinant forms implies that multiple infection is common. Most direct studies indicate that multiple infection is rare. We determined the rate of multiple infection in a longitudinal study of 58 HIV-1 positive participants from The Women's Interagency HIV Study with a richer sampling design than previous direct studies, and we investigated the role of recombination and sampling design on estimating the multiple infection rate.

Results

40% of our sample had multiple HIV-1 infections. This rate of multiple infection is statistically consistent with previous studies once differences in sampling design are taken into account. Injection drug use significantly increased the incidence of multiple infections. In general there was rapid elimination of secondary strains to undetectable levels, but in 3 cases a superinfecting strain displaced the initial infecting strain and in two cases the strains coexisted throughout the study. All but one secondary strain was detected as an inter- and/or intra-genic recombinant. Injection drug use significantly increased the rate of observed recombinants.

Conclusion

Our multiple infection rate is consistent with rates estimated from the frequency of recombinant forms of HIV-1. The fact that our results are also consistent with previous direct studies that had reported a much lower rate illustrates the critical role of sampling design in estimating this rate. Multiple infection and recombination significantly add to the genetic diversity of HIV-1 and its evolutionary potential, and injection drug use significantly increases both.

Amino acid covariation in a functionally important human immunodeficiency virus type 1 protein region is associated with population subdivision

The frequently reported amino acid covariation of the highly polymorphic human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) exterior envelope glycoprotein V3 region has been assumed to reflect fitness epistasis between residues. However, nonrandom association of amino acids, or linkage disequilibrium, has many possible causes, including population subdivision. If the amino acids at a set of sequence sites differ in frequencies between subpopulations, then analysis of the whole population may reveal linkage disequilibrium even if it does not exist in any subpopulation. HIV-1 has a complex population structure, and the effects of this structure on linkage disequilibrium were investigated by estimating within- and among-subpopulation components of variance in linkage disequilibrium. The amino acid covariation previously reported is explained by differences in amino acid frequencies among virus subpopulations in different patients and by nonsystematic disequilibrium among patients. Disequilibrium within patients appears to be entirely due to differences in amino acid frequencies among sampling time points and among chemokine coreceptor usage phenotypes of virus particles, but not source tissues. Positive selection explains differences in allele frequencies among time points and phenotypes, indicating that these differences are adaptive rather than due to genetic drift. However, the absence of a correlation between linkage disequilibrium and phenotype suggests that fitness epistasis is an unlikely cause of disequilibrium. Indeed, when population structure is removed by analyzing sequences from a single time point and phenotype, no disequilibrium is detectable within patients. These results caution against interpreting amino acid covariation and coevolution as evidence for fitness epistasis.

Fifteen years of env C2V3C3 evolution in six individuals infected clonally with human immunodeficiency virus type 1

The study of the evolution of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) requires blood samples collected longitudinally and data on the approximate time point of infection. Although these requirements were fulfilled in several previous studies, the infectious sources were either unknown or heterogeneous genetically. In the present study, HIV-1 env C2V3C3 (nt 7029-7315) evolution was examined retrospectively in a cohort of hemophiliacs. Compared to other cohorts, the area of interest here was the infection of six hemophiliacs by the same virus strain, that is, the infecting viruses shared an identical genome. As expected, divergence from the founder sequence as well as interpatient divergence of the predominant virus strains increased significantly over time. Based on the V3 nucleotide sequences, CCR5 usage was predicted exclusively throughout the whole period of infection in all patients. Interestingly, common patterns of viral evolution were detected in the patients of the cohort. Four amino acid substitutions within the V3 loop emerged and persisted subsequently in five (positions 305 and 308 of the HXB2 gp120 reference sequence) and six patients (positions 325 and 328 in HXB2 gp120), respectively. These common changes within the V3 loop are likely to be enforced by HIV-1 specific immune response.

Site-specific amino acid frequency, fitness and the mutational landscape model of adaptation in human immunodeficiency virus type 1

Analysis of the intensely studied HIV-1 gp120 V3 protein region reveals that the among-population mean site-specific frequency of an amino acid is a measure of its relative marginal fitness. This surprising result may arise if populations are displaced from mutation-selection equilibrium by fluctuating selection and if the probability of fixation of a beneficial amino acid is proportional to its selection coefficient.

Core set approach to reduce uncertainty of gene trees

Background

A genealogy based on gene sequences within a species plays an essential role in the estimation of the character, structure, and evolutionary history of that species. Because intraspecific sequences are more closely related than interspecific ones, detailed information on the evolutionary process may be available by determining all the node sequences of trees and provide insight into functional constraints and adaptations. However, strong evolutionary correlations on a few lineages make this determination difficult as a whole, and the maximum parsimony (MP) method frequently allows a number of topologies with a same total branching length.

Results

Kitazoe et al. developed multidimensional vector-space representation of phylogeny. It converts additivity of evolutionary distances to orthogonality among the vectors expressing branches, and provides a unified index to measure deviations from the orthogoality. In this paper, this index is used to detect and exclude sequences with large deviations from orthogonality, and then selects a maximum subset ("core set") of sequences for which MP generates a single solution. Once the core set tree is formed whose all the node sequences are given, the excluded sequences are found to have basically two phylogenetic positions on this tree, respectively. Fortunately, since multiple substitutions are rare in intra-species sequences, the variance of nucleotide transitions is confined to a small range. By applying the core set approach to 38 partial env sequences of HIV-1 in a single patient and also 198 mitochondrial COI and COII DNA sequences of Anopheles dirus, we demonstrate how consistently this approach constructs the tree.

Conclusion

In the HIV dataset, we confirmed that the obtained core set tree is the unique maximum set for which MP proposes a single tree. In the mosquito data set, the fluctuation of nucleotide transitions caused by the sequences excluded from the core set was very small. We reproduced this core-set tree by simulation based on random process, and applied our approach to many sets of the obtained endpoint sequences. Consequently, the ninety percent of the endpoint sequences was identified as the core sets and the obtained node sequences were perfectly identical to the true ones.

Purifying selection of CCR5-tropic human immunodeficiency virus type 1 variants in AIDS subjects that have developed syncytium-inducing, CXCR4-tropic viruses

Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) infection is established by virus variants that use the CCR5 co-receptor for entry (CCR5-tropic or R5 variants), whereas viruses that use CXCR4 as co-receptor (CXCR4-tropic or X4 variants) emerge during disease progression in approximately 50 % of infected subjects. X4 variants may have a higher fitness ex vivo and their detection is usually accompanied by faster T-cell depletion and the onset of AIDS in HIV-1-positive individuals. Here, the relationship between the sequence variation of the HIV-1 env V3-V5 region and positive selective pressure on R5 and X4 variants from infected subjects with CD4 T cell counts below 200 cells microl(-1) was studied. A correlation was found between genetic distance and CD4(+) cell count at late stages of the disease. R5 variants that co-existed with X4 variants were significantly less heterogeneous than R5 variants from subjects without X4 variants (P < 0.0001). Similarly, X4 variants had a significantly higher diversity than R5 variants (P < 0.0001), although residues under positive selection had a similar distribution pattern in both variants. Therefore, both X4 and R5 variants were subjected to high selective pressures from the host. Furthermore, the interaction between X4 and R5 variants within the same subject resulted in a purifying selection on R5 variants, which only survived as a homogeneous virus population. These results indicate that R5 variants from X4 phenotype samples were highly homogeneous and under weakly positive selective pressures. In contrast, R5 variants from R5 phenotype samples were highly heterogeneous and subject to positive selective pressures.

Recombination estimation under complex evolutionary models with the coalescent composite-likelihood method

The composite-likelihood estimator (CLE) of the population recombination rate considers only sites with exactly two alleles under a finite-sites mutation model (McVean, G. A. T., P. Awadalla, and P. Fearnhead. 2002. A coalescent-based method for detecting and estimating recombination from gene sequences. Genetics 160:1231-1241). While in such a model the identity of alleles is not considered, the CLE has been shown to be robust to minor misspecification of the underlying mutational model. However, there are many situations where the putative mutation and demographic history can be quite complex. One good example is rapidly evolving pathogens, like HIV-1. First we evaluated the performance of the CLE and the likelihood permutation test (LPT) under more complex, realistic models, including a general time reversible (GTR) substitution model, rate heterogeneity among sites (Gamma), positive selection, population growth, population structure, and noncontemporaneous sampling. Second, we relaxed some of the assumptions of the CLE allowing for a four-allele, GTR + Gamma model in an attempt to use the data more efficiently. Through simulations and the analysis of real data, we concluded that the CLE is robust to severe misspecifications of the substitution model, but underestimates the recombination rate in the presence of exponential growth, population mixture, selection, or noncontemporaneous sampling. In such cases, the use of more complex models slightly increases performance in some occasions, especially in the case of the LPT. Thus, our results provide for a more robust application of the estimation of recombination rates.

Neutralizing antibody responses drive the evolution of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 envelope during recent HIV infection

HIV type 1 (HIV-1) can rapidly escape from neutralizing antibody responses. The genetic basis of this escape in vivo is poorly understood. We compared the pattern of evolution of the HIV-1 env gene between individuals with recent HIV infection whose virus exhibited either a low or a high rate of escape from neutralizing antibody responses. We demonstrate that the rate of viral escape at a phenotypic level is highly variable among individuals, and is strongly correlated with the rate of amino acid substitutions. We show that dramatic escape from neutralizing antibodies can occur in the relative absence of changes in glycosylation or insertions and deletions ("indels") in the envelope; conversely, changes in glycosylation and indels occur even in the absence of neutralizing antibody responses. Comparison of our data with the predictions of a mathematical model support a mechanism in which escape from neutralizing antibodies occurs via many amino acid substitutions, with low cross-neutralization between closely related viral strains. Our results suggest that autologous neutralizing antibody responses may play a pivotal role in the diversification of HIV-1 envelope during the early stages of infection.