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Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, October 2007, p. 1266-1273, Vol. 14, No. 10
1071-412X/07/$08.00+0 doi:10.1128/CVI.00169-07
Copyright © 2007, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Kirsten Roomp,2,
Martin Däumer,3
Jacob Nattermann,1
Martin Vogel,1
Jürgen K. Rockstroh,1
Niko Beerenwinkel,4
Rolf Kaiser,3
Hans-Dieter Nischalke,1
Tilman Sauerbruch,1
Thomas Lengauer,2
Ulrich Spengler,1* on behalf of the Kompetenznetz HIV/AIDS
Department of Internal Medicine I, University of Bonn, 53105 Bonn, Germany,1 Department of Computational Biology and Applied Algorithmics, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, 66123 Saarbrücken, Germany,2 Institute of Virology, University of Cologne, 50935 Cologne, Germany,3 Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley, California4
Received 18 April 2007/ Returned for modification 31 May 2007/ Accepted 2 August 2007
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Recently, Moore et al. studied the selection pressure exerted by HLA-restricted immune responses on the evolution of the HIV-1 sequence at the population level (30). A cohort of 473 HIV-1-infected patients was genotyped for the HLA-A and HLA-B loci. The most recent sequence of the HIV-1 reverse transcriptase (RT) between amino acid positions 20 and 227 was aligned to an HIV-1 consensus sequence, and viral mutations were identified. These mutations were then tested for association with distinct HLA-A or -B alleles. The authors identified 64 positive and 17 negative associations, although only 12 remained after correction for multiple testing. Several of these mutations were located in known CTL epitopes.
In a second study of the same cohort, the aforementioned group identified interactions between antiretroviral drugs and HLA alleles and diversity in the RT and protease viral sequences (21). These interactions led to higher frequencies of antiviral drug resistance mutations in patients with certain HLA alleles in some cases but also to lower frequencies in other cases. This indicates that HLA-dependent specific immune responses can support but also prevent the evolution of drug resistance.
The previous studies have analyzed the HLA-driven evolution of HIV-1 in only a fragment of the RT and protease. Therefore we wanted to examine if this phenomenon can be confirmed in the entire first half of the RT. We were also interested in extending the analysis to include the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II locus HLA-DRB1 to better understand selection pressure by CD4+ T helper cells at the population level. In order to minimize the influence of founder effects on the HLA associations found (7), we limited the analysis to only those patients infected by HIV-1 clade B viruses and performed an analysis of potential viral linage effects within the cohort.
Furthermore, we wanted to assess the presence of "hot spots," where the sequence mutates more easily/rapidly due to immune pressure, and how mutations persist over time.
Finally, to understand the clinical significance of our findings, we analyzed whether HLA-driven mutations in the RT and/or protease sequence of HIV-1 lead to antiviral drug resistance and if a patient's HLA type has an impact on whether drug resistance mutations are accumulated in a specific order in the case of thymidine analogue mutations (TAMs).
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TABLE 1. Characteristics of the patient cohort
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For HIV genotyping, a fragment of the pol gene containing the complete protease gene and the first 650 to 750 nucleotides of the RT gene was analyzed by direct sequencing of PCR products, as described in the work of Balduin et al. (3).
All patient and sequence information was entered into a relational database specifically designed for the analysis of the host immune response effects in HIV-1 infection.
HLA-associated mutations in the RT and protease. All amino acids in the complete protease and between positions 1 and 330 in the RT were examined in the most recent sequences from all patients. As a first step, we analyzed each amino acid position by use of an extension of Fisher's exact test for associations with HLA alleles (29). In order to improve the power of the calculations, very rare alleles (less than or equal to 4% of the cohort) were excluded from the analysis. All HLA allele covariates with P values of less than 0.05 were identified and fitted in a subsequent multivariate analysis to logistic regression models. We used binomial models where the linear predictor consisted of all significant alleles and the response was a factor for which variant amino acids were classified as successes. Correction for multiple testing used the false discovery rate (FDR) method (6). Due to the low numbers of deletions and insertions in the sequences, no separate analysis was done to take these into account.
Distribution and persistence of HLA-associated mutations. A previous study has described CTL epitope "hot spots," in which immunodominant epitopes cluster within distinct regions of the HIV gp120 protein (9). The CTL epitopes collected in the HIV Molecular Immunology Database at Los Alamos also appeared to be localized in particular regions of HIV proteins (27). We were interested in determining whether the distribution of HLA-associated mutations was uniform across the RT and protease. Therefore, the distribution of known mutations was compared to 10,000 randomly generated distributions according to the uniform model, each with an equal number of sequence mutations, and tested for statistical significance.
We also analyzed the persistence of HLA-associated mutations over time in our cohort. For 70 patients, HIV sequences were available for at least two individual time points that were a minimum of 6 months apart (the sequences for 50 patients were collected more than 1 year apart). None of these sequences was acquired during the acute stage of HIV infection; rather, they were acquired at a later time point. The persistence of mutations was examined at each of the already identified positions.
Impact of HLA on drug resistance mutation pathways. During antiretroviral therapy, the virus is exposed to strong selective pressure, which can result in an accumulation of mutations conferring drug resistance. These mutations are usually persistent, provided that there is continuous drug-induced selection pressure (31). Therefore, the development of resistance within the HIV genome can be regarded as the accumulation of such mutations. This accumulation has been modeled by weighted branchings or directed trees, which provide an intuitive model of directed dependencies between events and their time of occurrence. The single-tree model has been extended to mixtures of trees (so-called mutagenetic tree mixture models) in order to capture more complex evolutionary scenarios, for which the software package Mtreemix has been developed (5).
Of particular interest were the TAMs in the RT that can arise after treatment with nucleoside RT inhibitors (NRTIs) zidovudine, stavudine, and abacavir. Studies have suggested that HIV-1 develops TAMs by one of two distinct pathways: TAM1 (41L, 210W, and 215F/Y) or TAM2 (67N, 70R, and 219E/Q) (17).
We identified all patients in our cohort that had undergone NRTI treatment and examined their HIV sequences for TAMs to determine whether particular HLA alleles can be associated with either the TAM1 or the TAM2 pathway.
HLA-driven selection at antiretroviral drug resistance sites. Several HLA allele-specific mutations have been reported to be located in positions of known drug resistance mutations (21, 22). An analysis of the sequences of our patient cohort was performed in order to determine whether similar associations could be identified.
Phylogenetic analysis. In order to explore the impact of viral lineage founder effects, we applied ProtTest version 1.3 (1, 14, 16) to find the best-fitting model of protein evolution for the HIV sequence alignment of the cohort. The best-fitting model according to both the Akaike information criterion and the Bayesian information criterion (19) was the Jones-Taylor-Thornton (JTT) model (23), with gamma rates, variable amino acid frequencies, and invariable sites. We then used PhyML (16) for estimating a maximum-likelihood phylogeny for the given protein evolution model and performed 100 bootstrap replications in order to obtain bootstrap support values. Subsequently, we used neighbor-net (10, 20) to get a better visualization of the noise in the phylogenetic signal.
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The antiretroviral treatment group consisted of 18 (10.1%) patients who received two or fewer antiretroviral drugs. One patient received zidovudine monotherapy, and 17 were treated with several nucleoside analogues (zidovudine, didanosine, zalcitabine, stavudine, or lamivudine). The remaining 14 patients (7.8%) did not receive any antiretroviral drugs.
With regard to the length of treatment, 18 patients had been treated for <1 year, 62 patients had been treated for between 1 and 5 years, and 88 patients had been treated for >5 years. The staging of HIV disease according to the European modification of the 1986 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staging (11) in the cohort was A for 58 patients, B for 59 patients, and C for 57 patients. Five patients were not classified.
HLA-associated mutations in the RT and protease. HIV RT sequences (amino acid positions 1 to 330) were initially aligned with the reference sequence HXB2 (27). Associations were subsequently confirmed using the population consensus sequence, which was generated by assigning the most common amino acid for each position of all sequences pooled from the cohort. Overall, 15 associations with uncorrected P values of less than 0.005 were found; these also had P values of less than 0.05 in the logistic regression models (Table 2). Ten of these associations had P values of less than 0.05 after correction for multiple testing.
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TABLE 2. HIV-1 sequence mutations in the HIV-1 RT
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Interestingly, six of the identified associations were negative associations, indicating that mutations in the RT were less likely if the patient carried that particular allele: amino acid position 177 was negatively associated with HLA-B*35, position 178 with HLA-B*35, position 188 with HLA-DRB1*12, position 207 with B*15, position 277 with HLA-A*03, and position 291 with HLA-B*27.
In the protease, we found HLA-associated mutations at seven positions with uncorrected P values of less than 0.005; these also had P values of less than 0.05 in the logistic regression models (Table 3). Four associations had P values of less than 0.05 after correction for multiple testing, with three of these associations being located in previously defined epitopes. No negative associations were found.
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TABLE 3. HIV-1 sequence mutations in the HIV-1 protease
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Overall, HLA-B alleles were involved in more associations (n = 15 [68%]) than alleles from either HLA-A (n = 5 [23%]) or HLA-DRB1 (n = 2 [9%]).
Distribution and persistence of HLA-associated mutations. The HLA-associated mutations that have been identified in our patient cohort do not appear to be uniformly distributed across the protease and RT but are more frequent in regions known to have many epitopes. However, an analysis of the nonrandom distribution of the HIV-1 sequence mutations showed only a weak level of significance in the protease (P value equal to 0.06) and none in the RT (data not shown).
For most patients, sequence mutations were consistently found in all available sequences. In relatively few cases, the mutations were not persistent, with the wild-type amino acid being replaced by a variant amino acid in most cases (Tables 2 and 3). Drug therapy did not appear to influence the gain or loss of HIV-1 sequence mutations, as most patients had HAART composed of diverse drug combinations and yet their mutations remained stable throughout.
Impact of HLA on drug resistance mutation pathways. Of our patient cohort, 165 patients were treated with an NRTI regimen containing zidovudine, stavudine, or abacavir before the sequence used for analysis was generated. Of these patients, 72 had no TAMs reported. For TAM1 (41L, 210W, and 215F/Y), 9 patients matched the pathway and 25 showed either one mutation too few or one too many. For TAM2 (67N, 70R, and 219E/Q), 10 patients had matching mutations and 10 patients showed either one mutation too many or one too few. The remaining patients showed even rarer combinations of these mutations.
We looked for associations between either the TAM1 or the TAM2 pathway and a particular HLA type by use of Mtreemix. This also allowed for imperfect matches to a particular pathway, because the software supports the analysis of complex evolutionary scenarios. However, no significant associations were found.
HLA-driven selection at antiretroviral drug resistance sites. We examined all associations for our cohort, which are also known drug resistance mutations (Table 4). Our results differ somewhat from those of John et al. (21), who reported drug resistance mutations at protease amino acid residues 20, 32, 36, and 48 to have positive HLA associations. For our cohort, we could not confirm any of these associations. John et al. also reported the RT amino acid residues 41, 67, 70, 118, 210, and 215 to have positive HLA associations matching NRTI-associated mutations. Of these, only residue 67 was associated with DRB1*08 in our cohort (A*10 in the work of John et al. [21]).
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TABLE 4. HIV-1 sequence mutations at positions which are also known drug resistance mutations and numbers of patients exhibiting the indicated HLA type who received the indicated drug type
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We observed that HCV-coinfected patients were less likely to have received antiretroviral therapy which included PIs.
Phylogenetic analysis. The shape of the maximum-likelihood phylogeny is almost star-like: the sequence diversity within clusters is higher than the diversity between clusters. Another indicator for the star likeness is the low bootstrap support for all branches in the interior of the phylogeny. The resulting neighbor-net network (Fig. 1) shows a good deal of netting in the center of the phylogeny and rejects a clustering into distinct groups. Hence, the neighbor-net method also suggests a star-like shape for the phylogeny. Given that the sequences evolved along a star-like phylogeny, we can rule out founder effects or other artifacts due to a shared evolutionary history.
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FIG. 1. Neighbor-net network of the cohort illustrating a star-like shape and a high level of netting in the center of the phylogeny.
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Four out of a total of 12 significant associations previously reported for the RT were confirmed for our cohort, all of which corresponded to known epitopes (Table 2). Moreover, we describe 11 new associations, with 4 of these lying outside the region of the RT analyzed previously (30). Several of these associations also correspond to known T-cell epitopes.
The identified CTL escape mutations, for which known epitopes exist, do not consistently lie in known anchor positions. Due to the complex pathway by which an epitope is processed before being displayed on the cell surface by the HLA molecule and the incompletely understood nature of T-cell receptor binding and T-cell activation, HIV-1 sequence mutations in nonanchor positions could very well still have a negative impact on the recognition of such epitopes and hence be beneficial for the virus.
These data support the hypothesis that the associations found are indeed epitopes targeted by CTLs and that continuous pressure by CTL responses leads to the selection of survival strains that have mutations in these regions. The fact that we cannot reproduce all associations described in the previous publications and that we found a number of additional associations may be due to several reasons: the first cohort consisted of patients from Western Australia, whereas our patients are mainly Caucasians from Germany. Thus, the available HLAs may differ, and the levels of access to and types of antiviral drugs may be different. However, the fact that we were able to confirm a number of associations despite these differences proves that our main conclusions, although affected by local factors, are generally true. Furthermore, HLA-associated mutations, once acquired, were stable and found in later viral isolates from the same patient. This supports the hypothesis that the continuing selection pressure by T-cell recognition prevents the virus from reverting back despite changes in the antiviral drug regimen.
MHC class I-dependent CTL responses shape the viral sequence by directly killing infected cells that present the right epitope in their HLA molecules. So far, the impact of MHC class alleles II on viral evolution has been studied only for a small patient group. Harcourt et al. (18) described HIV sequence variation in the p24 GAG epitope of HLA-DR1. Our data from a large patient cohort support their observation of a role of MHC class II alleles and CD4 T-cell responses in the evolution of the HIV-1 sequence. We found two associations in the RT region, also demonstrating that even class II alleles can exert selection pressure on viral sequences.
We also studied the effect of MHC class I and class II on the evolution of the full-length protease sequence. Interestingly, we did not find any of the associations which were described for the Western Australian cohort (21). The underlying reason for this is unclear. However, since most patients in our cohort and the Western Australian cohort were undergoing drug treatment, it is possible that the type, time point, and length of use of certain PIs may have affected the results from our study as well those from the previous studies. Nevertheless, three associations were found within previously described epitopes for the same HLA allele, and four associations remained significant after correction for multiple testing, supporting the validity of the associations reported.
Although we were not able to confirm statistically the existence of "hot spots," as the effect reached only a weak level of statistical significance (P value equal to 0.06), it appears that certain regions in the RT and protease are targeted by a greater number of epitopes and therefore CTLs, thus driving viral evolution in this region.
Recently, a study by Kiepiela et al. reported that the relative contribution of HLA-B alleles outweighs the contribution of HLA-A alleles in influencing HIV disease outcome (25). This is also reflected in our results, as more significant associations were found with HLA-B alleles (n = 15 [68%]) than with HLA-A alleles (n = 5 [23%]) or HLA-DRB1 alleles (n = 2 [9%]).
For most patients, HLA-associated HIV-1 sequence mutations were consistently found for all sequences from that patient, while only relatively few cases had HLA-associated mutations that were not stable. These changes were generally from a wild-type amino acid to the variant amino acid in the subsequent sample. This observation is consistent with other studies showing that CTL escape mutations develop soon after infection (24).
We also analyzed whether these HLA-associated mutations were influenced by drug therapy and found that the impact of drug therapy on the associations for our patient cohort was not statistically significant. In some cases, patients in the cohort had not received a particular drug treatment (tipranavir or atazanavir) yet showed HLA-associated mutations at positions where known mutations providing resistance to these particular drugs can also occur. As tipranavir and atazanavir were first approved for antiviral therapy shortly after our patients' viral sequences were acquired, it is not possible for these patients to have been infected with an already resistant viral strain. This indicates either that these mutations have become locked in our population, so that the virus cannot revert back, or that HLA-driven selection of mutations may predispose some patients to the development of some drug resistance mutations. In order to optimize the therapy of patients carrying particular HLA types, the choice of future therapy regimens should take into account the fact that some patients are more likely to develop particular HLA-associated mutations, which coexist at residues of drug resistance mutations. This consideration could be made for positions in the protease that are linked to specific drugs (tipranavir and atazanavir) but not to the majority of PIs, multi-NRTIs, or NNRTIs.
In summary, we were able to confirm immune-driven selection pressure not only by MHC class I alleles but also by MHC class II alleles on the development of escape mutations at a population level. Further, we have described a number of HLA-associated mutations in the RT as well as protease and, finally, have analyzed their possible impact on the success of antiviral drug treatment.
Published ahead of print on 22 August 2007. ![]()
Both authors contributed equally to this work. ![]()
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