Study on the Variation of the env Gene of HIV-I in vitro

In order to understand the characteristics and rules of HIV diversity when passaged in vitro , the systematic study on the variation of env gene of HIV strain introduced from American in 1988 was carried out. Taking all the following strains as the objects: the 96 strain derived from the primary strain by continuous freeze thaw usage in laboratory for more than eight years; the 42?h strain derived from primary strain by serial passaging with continuous changing of host cell in MT4 and HelaCD4+ and the strains sampled from serial passaged primary strain in MT4 cell every ten generations, The pre DNA fragments of these HIV env gene were amplified by nested PCR. The fragment of 1?200 bp originated from the V1 V5 region was analyzed. The subtypes of these HIV strains were identified by Heteroduplexes Mobility Assay (HMA). The main results were: (1) the env gene diversity of all the strains were indistinctive, all the nucleotide homogeneous were greater than 92% and all the gene diversity distance were .