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Origins of HIV Traced to Chimps in Cameroon
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Ed Susman,
After a 15-year quest, scientists believe that they have finally tracked the origins of HIV to a troop of chimpanzees living in a remote corner of Cameroon, near the border of Gabon and the Congo Republic, in West Central Africa.
DENVER, Feb. 8 -
After a 15-year quest, scientists believe that they have finally tracked the origins of HIV to a troop of chimpanzees living in a remote corner of Cameroon, near the border of Gabon and the Congo Republic, in West Central Africa.
Researchers told the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections here how they literally dug into decades- old piles of chimpanzee feces to find the earliest evidence of simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that most closely resembles the earliest known human immunodeficiency viral sample.
That human sample dates to 1959. It was found in serum from a patient in Kinshasa, just down the river from where Paul Sharp, Ph.D., a professor of genetics at the University of Nottingham in England, believes the virus jumped from a chimpanzee to a human, probably in the 1930s.
"By the time the man in Kinshasa had HIV infection, there were probably thousands of people in the region with the disease," said Dr. Sharp.
The closest virus to HIV-1, the most common form of human infection, in the animal kingdom is SIVcpz that is found in a subspecies of chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes troglodytes. Dr. Sharp and his colleagues tracked families of these chimpanzees in the isolated area of Cameroon, taking samples from dried mounds of feces and then performing molecular sequencing of the samples.
He said the techniques used were completely noninvasive. None of the chimpanzees had to be captured, shot, or injected for scientists to retrieve the biological specimens needed to connect the dots and lead to the location of the chimpanzee troop.
"These SIVcpz strains exhibit a local phylogeographic clustering, allowing us to trace the origins of the pandemic to distinct, geographic chimpanzee communities," Dr. Sharp said. "Thus, 25 years into the AIDS epidemic, the origins of this newly emerged disease have been elucidated."
"This study is really a remarkable achievement," said John Coffin, Ph.D., a professor of molecular biology at Tufts in Boston. "They have shown the way to settle one of the many issues in HIV research."
Dr. Sharp noted that finding the road map to the original reservoir of HIV meant untangling the phylogenetic web that includes more than 30 species of primates -- monkeys to chimpanzees.
Primary source: Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections 13th annual Paul Sharp, Ph.D.
Source reference:
Abstract 70: Where AIDS came From
By Ed Susman, MedPage Today Staff Writer
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