J Virol, May 1998, p. 3534-3538, Vol. 72, No. 5
0022-538X/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Laboratoire de Virologie, Hôpital Bichat-Claude Bernard, 75018 Paris, France,1 and Virus Laboratory, Microbiology Department, School of Medicine, Gr. T. Popa University, 6600 Iasi, Romania2
Received 21 August 1997/Accepted 15 January 1998
We sequenced and phylogenetically analyzed the reverse transcriptase (RT) regions of the pol genes of 14 human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) isolates from Romanian patients, which were classified as subtype F on the basis of env gene structure. The RT sequences showed that the strains clustered phylogenetically and were equidistant from other HIV-1 subtypes as shown by the neighbor-joining and maximum-likelihood methods, allowing us to define HIV-1 subtype F according to the pol classification. The subtype F RT sequences differed from reported group M RT sequences by 10.94% (for nucleotides) and 7.6% (for amino acids). Phenotypic analysis of subtype F susceptibility to three classes of antiretroviral compounds showed an increase in the 50% inhibitory concentration of the tetrahydroimidazo[4,5,1-jk][1,4]-benzodiazepin-2-(1H)-one and -thione (TIBO) derivate R82913 for one strain which was naturally resistant to this compound. This first report of subtype F pol sequences confirms the perfect correlation between the phylogenetic positions determined by env and pol analyses and suggests that virus variability might influence the efficacy of antiretroviral treatments. This finding warrants a global evaluation of the phenotypic and genotypic susceptibility of HIV-1 subtypes to antiretroviral drugs.
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