Francoise Seillier-Moiseiwitsch, University of North Carolina
Bioinformatics for HIV Genomics
The inefficiency of the
replication process in HIV, like in any retrovirus, gives rise to many
variants. The observed variability reflects both viability of the
mutant and selection pressures from the immune system. I will review
some recently developed methodology to study various aspects of the
molecular evolution of HIV: to quantify heterogeneity, to compare
subgroups, to detect correlated mutations and incorporate them into
phylogenetic reconstructions, and to link the sequence information to
specific biological characteristics. Finally, I will relay the results
of an on-going project where we have gathered a large number of sets
of sequences from the HIV literature to select the the best-fitting
evolutionary model for different regions of the HIV genome.