HIV-1 Intrapatient Sequence Diversity in the Immunogenic V3 Region

The third hypervariable domain (V3) of the human immunodeficiency virus type-1 (HIV-1) envelope protein (env) can serve as an epitope for potent type-specific neutralizing antibodies (NAbs) -- thus short peptides predicted on the most commonly found variants of the antigenic tip of the V3 loop have been considered as potential candidates for an HIV peptide vaccine. To evaluate the extent of intrapatient variation in the immunogenic crest of the V3 loop, sequence sets were analyzed from individuals for whom multiple V3 sequences were available. Several strategies for selecting the best sets of hexapeptides to represent the variable tip of the V3 loop were considered and their effectiveness was evaluated by comparing them with the sequence sets from individuals. Most individuals carried at least one, and frequently many, variants that did not match any of the sequences from among the ten most common hexapeptides. Intrapatient viral sequence variation was increased by including sequences derived from brain biopsy specimens as well as from blood. Additionally, sequences obtained from brain specimens of different individuals had common elements which were not conserved in the corresponding blood samples, suggesting that certain amino acids in the V3 loop may be requisite for viral propagation in the CNS.