HIV-1 Origins: what we don’t know

Commentary
Cellscience Reviews Vol 3 No 4
ISSN 1742-8130

HIV-1 Origins: what we don’t know

Nathan D. Wolfe ¹ & Tony Goldberg ^2,3

¹ Dept. of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, University of California Los Angeles, 650 Charles E. Young Drive South, CA 90095, USA
² Dept. of Epidemiology, College of Veterinary Medicine &
³ Dept. of Pathobiology, 2001 South Lincoln Avenue, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61802, USA

We know more about the diversity and origins of Human Immunodeficieny Virus (HIV) than perhaps about any other human pathogen. ‘HIV’, in fact, encompasses at least four distinct viruses, three of which, (HIV-2, HIV-1 O and HIV-1 N), have been geographically restricted in their spread, while only one, HIV-1 M, has expanded to cause the global AIDS pandemic. Each of these viruses is more closely related to one of the non-human primate Simian Immunodeficiency Viruses (SIVs) than any of them is to each other, an initially surprising result that shows that the human viruses were the result of at least four independent cross-species transmission events. For example, HIV-2, a virus largely limited to people in West Africa, is more closely related to the West African virus of sooty mangabeys (Cercocebus atys), SIVsm, than it is to any of the other known human viruses, suggesting that HIV-2 is, effectively, a form of SIVsm that has ‘jumped’ from sooty mangabeys to humans. Although our understanding of the natural diversity of the primate immunodeficiency viruses is still incomplete, we now know that a number of these viruses infect disparate primate species; a narrative of the origins of these important viruses has emerged as a result.

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