Person:

Zody, M

Viruses diversify over time within hosts, often undercutting the effectiveness of host defenses and therapeutic interventions. To design successful vaccines and therapeutics, it is critical to better understand viral diversification, including comprehensively characterizing the genetic variants in viral intra-host populations and modeling changes from transmission through the course of infection. Massively parallel sequencing technologies can overcome the cost constraints of older sequencing methods and obtain the high sequence coverage needed to detect rare genetic variants (<1%) within an infected host, and to assay variants without prior knowledge. Critical to interpreting deep sequence data sets is the ability to distinguish biological variants from process errors with high sensitivity and specificity. To address this challenge, we describe V-Phaser, an algorithm able to recognize rare biological variants in mixed populations. V-Phaser uses covariation (i.e. phasing) between observed variants to increase sensitivity and an expectation maximization algorithm that iteratively recalibrates base quality scores to increase specificity. Overall, V-Phaser achieved >97% sensitivity and >97% specificity on control read sets. On data derived from a patient after four years of HIV-1 infection, V-Phaser detected 2,015 variants across the ∼10 kb genome, including 603 rare variants (<1% frequency) detected only using phase information. V-Phaser identified variants at frequencies down to 0.2%, comparable to the detection threshold of allele-specific PCR, a method that requires prior knowledge of the variants. The high sensitivity and specificity of V-Phaser enables identifying and tracking changes in low frequency variants in mixed populations such as RNA viruses.

Deep sequencing technologies have the potential to transform the study of highly variable viral pathogens by providing a rapid and cost-effective approach to sensitively characterize rapidly evolving viral quasispecies. Here, we report on a high-throughput whole HIV-1 genome deep sequencing platform that combines 454 pyrosequencing with novel assembly and variant detection algorithms. In one subject we combined these genetic data with detailed immunological analyses to comprehensively evaluate viral evolution and immune escape during the acute phase of HIV-1 infection. The majority of early, low frequency mutations represented viral adaptation to host CD8+ T cell responses, evidence of strong immune selection pressure occurring during the early decline from peak viremia. CD8+ T cell responses capable of recognizing these low frequency escape variants coincided with the selection and evolution of more effective secondary HLA-anchor escape mutations. Frequent, and in some cases rapid, reversion of transmitted mutations was also observed across the viral genome. When located within restricted CD8 epitopes these low frequency reverting mutations were sufficient to prime de novo responses to these epitopes, again illustrating the capacity of the immune response to recognize and respond to low frequency variants. More importantly, rapid viral escape from the most immunodominant CD8+ T cell responses coincided with plateauing of the initial viral load decline in this subject, suggestive of a potential link between maintenance of effective, dominant CD8 responses and the degree of early viremia reduction. We conclude that the early control of HIV-1 replication by immunodominant CD8+ T cell responses may be substantially influenced by rapid, low frequency viral adaptations not detected by conventional sequencing approaches, which warrants further investigation. These data support the critical need for vaccine-induced CD8+ T cell responses to target more highly constrained regions of the virus in order to ensure the maintenance of immunodominant CD8 responses and the sustained decline of early viremia.

Human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the leading cause of lower respiratory tract disease in infants and young children and an important respiratory pathogen in the elderly and immunocompromised. While population-wide molecular epidemiology studies have shown multiple cocirculating RSV genotypes and revealed antigenic and genetic change over successive seasons, little is known about the extent of viral diversity over the course of an individual infection, the origins of novel variants, or the effect of immune pressure on viral diversity and potential immune-escape mutations. To investigate viral population diversity in the presence and absence of selective immune pressures, we studied whole-genome deep sequencing of RSV in upper airway samples from an infant with severe combined immune deficiency syndrome and persistent RSV infection. The infection continued over several months before and after bone marrow transplant (BMT) from his RSV-immune father. RSV diversity was characterized in 26 samples obtained over 78 days. Diversity increased after engraftment, as defined by T-cell presence, and populations reflected variation mostly within the G protein, the major surface antigen. Minority populations with known palivizumab resistance mutations emerged after its administration. The viral population appeared to diversify in response to selective pressures, showing a statistically significant growth in diversity in the presence of pressure from immunity. Defining escape mutations and their dynamics will be useful in the design and application of novel therapeutics and vaccines. These data can contribute to future studies of the relationship between within-host and population-wide RSV phylodynamics.