An Evaluation of Phylogenetic Methods for Reconstructing Transmitted HIV Variants using Longitudinal Clonal HIV Sequence Data

UNLABELLED: A population of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) within a host often descends from a single transmitted/founder virus. The high mutation rate of HIV, coupled with long delays between infection and diagnosis, make isolating and characterizing this strain a challenge. In theory, ancestral reconstruction could be used to recover this strain from sequences sampled in chronic infection; however, the accuracy of phylogenetic techniques in this context is unknown. To evaluate the accuracy of these methods, we applied ancestral reconstruction to a large panel of published longitudinal clonal and/or single-genome-amplification HIV sequence data sets with at least one intrapatient sequence set sampled within 6 months of infection or seroconversion (n = 19,486 sequences, median [interquartile range] = 49 [20 to 86] sequences/set). The consensus of the earliest sequences was used as the best possible estimate of the transmitted/founder. These sequences were compared to ancestral reconstructions from sequences sampled at later time points using both phylogenetic and phylogeny-naive methods. Overall, phylogenetic methods conferred a 16% improvement in reproducing the consensus of early sequences, compared to phylogeny-naive methods. This relative advantage increased with intrapatient sequence diversity (P < 10(-5)) and the time elapsed between the earliest and subsequent samples (P < 10(-5)). However, neither approach performed well for reconstructing ancestral indel variation, especially within indel-rich regions of the HIV genome. Although further improvements are needed, our results indicate that phylogenetic methods for ancestral reconstruction significantly outperform phylogeny-naive alternatives, and we identify experimental conditions and study designs that can enhance accuracy of transmitted/founder virus reconstruction. IMPORTANCE: When HIV is transmitted into a new host, most of the viruses fail to infect host cells. Consequently, an HIV infection tends to be descended from a single "founder" virus. A priority target for the vaccine research, these transmitted/founder viruses are difficult to isolate since newly infected individuals are often unaware of their status for months or years, by which time the virus population has evolved substantially. Here, we report on the potential use of evolutionary methods to reconstruct the genetic sequence of the transmitted/founder virus from its descendants at later stages of an infection. These methods can recover this ancestral sequence with an overall error rate of about 2.3%-about 15% more information than if we had ignored the evolutionary relationships among viruses. Although there is no substitute for sampling infections at earlier points in time, these methods can provide useful information about the genetic makeup of transmitted/founder HIV.

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