HIV coreceptor tropism determination and mutational pattern identification

Sci Rep. 2016 Feb 17:6:21280. doi: 10.1038/srep21280.

Abstract

In the early stages of infection, Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 (HIV-1) generally selects CCR5 as the primary coreceptor for entering the host cell. As infection progresses, the virus evolves and may exhibit a coreceptor-switch to CXCR4. Accurate determination coreceptor usage and identification key mutational patterns associated tropism switch are essential for selection of appropriate therapies and understanding mechanism of coreceptor change. We developed a classifier composed of two coreceptor-specific weight matrices (CMs) based on a full-scale dataset. For this classifier, we found an AUC of 0.97, an accuracy of 95.21% and an MCC of 0.885 (sensitivity 92.92%; specificity 95.54%) in a ten-fold cross-validation, outperforming all other methods on an independent dataset (13% higher MCC value than geno2pheno and 15% higher MCC value than PSSM). A web server (http://spg.med.tsinghua.edu.cn/CM.html) based on our classifier was provided. Patterns of genetic mutations that occur along with coreceptor transitions were further identified based on the score of each sequence. Six pairs of one-AA mutational patterns and three pairs of two-AA mutational patterns were identified to associate with increasing propensity for X4 tropism. These mutational patterns offered new insights into the mechanism of coreceptor switch and aided in monitoring coreceptor switch.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computational Biology / methods
  • Datasets as Topic
  • HIV Infections / genetics*
  • HIV Infections / metabolism
  • HIV Infections / virology*
  • HIV-1 / physiology*
  • Humans
  • Mutation*
  • ROC Curve
  • Receptors, CCR5 / genetics*
  • Receptors, CCR5 / metabolism
  • Receptors, HIV / genetics*
  • Receptors, HIV / metabolism
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Viral Tropism*

Substances

  • Receptors, CCR5
  • Receptors, HIV