HIV transmission

HIV-1 is transmitted by sexual contact across mucosal surfaces, by maternal-infant exposure, and by percutaneous inoculation. For reasons that are still incompletely understood, CCR5-tropic viruses (R5 viruses) are preferentially transmitted by all routes. Transmission is followed by an orderly appe...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cold Spring Harbor perspectives in medicine 2012-11, Vol.2 (11), p.a006965-a006965
Main Authors: Shaw, George M, Hunter, Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Disease Models, Animal
env Gene Products, Human Immunodeficiency Virus
HIV Infections - diagnosis
HIV Infections - epidemiology
HIV Infections - transmission
HIV Infections - virology
HIV-1 - genetics
HIV-1 - immunology
Humans
Models, Theoretical
Phenotype
Receptors, CCR5
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Summary:HIV-1 is transmitted by sexual contact across mucosal surfaces, by maternal-infant exposure, and by percutaneous inoculation. For reasons that are still incompletely understood, CCR5-tropic viruses (R5 viruses) are preferentially transmitted by all routes. Transmission is followed by an orderly appearance of viral and host markers of infection in the blood plasma. In the acute phase of infection, HIV-1 replicates exponentially and diversifies randomly, allowing for an unambiguous molecular identification of transmitted/founder virus genomes and a precise characterization of the population bottleneck to virus transmission. Sexual transmission of HIV-1 most often results in productive clinical infection arising from a single virus, highlighting the extreme bottleneck and inherent inefficiency in virus transmission. It remains to be determined if HIV-1 transmission is largely a stochastic process whereby any reasonably fit R5 virus can be transmitted or if there are features of transmitted/founder viruses that facilitate their transmission in a biologically meaningful way. Human tissue explant models of HIV-1 infection and animal models of SIV/SHIV/HIV-1 transmission, coupled with new challenge virus strains that more closely reflect transmitted/founder viruses, have the potential to elucidate fundamental mechanisms in HIV-1 transmission relevant to vaccine design and other prevention strategies.
ISSN:2157-1422
2472-5412
DOI:10.1101/cshperspect.a006965