分子免疫药理学（郑永唐）知识库

The on-going generation of HIV-1 inter-subtype recombination has led to new circulating recombinant forms (CRFs) and unique recombinant forms (URFs) in Asia. Here, we evaluated whether previously reported URFs were actually CRFs. All available complete or near full-length HIV-1 URFs sequences from Asia were retrieved from the HIV Los Alamos National Laboratory Sequence database, and phylogenetic, transmission cluster and bootscan analyses were performed using MEGA 6.0, Cluster Picker 1.2.1, and SimPlot3.5.1. According to the criterion of new CRF, two new HIV-1 CRFs (CRF87_cpx and CRF88_BC) were identified from these available URFs. CRF87_cpx was comprised of HIV-1 subtypes B, C and CRF01_AE, and CRF88_BC was comprised of subtypes B and C. HIV Blast and bootscan analysis revealed that besides the three representative strains, there were two additional CRF87_cpx strains. Furthermore, we defined 7 dominant URFs (dURF01-dURF07), each of which contained two strains sharing same recombination map and can be used as sequence references to facilitate the finding of new potential CRFs in future. These results will benefit the molecular epidemiological investigation of HIV-1 in Asia.