0000000000676444
AUTHOR
D Dionisio
Detection of drug resistance mutations at low plasma HIV-1 RNA load in a European multicentre cohort study
Background and objectives: Guidelines indicate a plasma HIV-1 RNA load of 500-1000 copies/mL as the minimal threshold for antiretroviral drug resistance testing. Resistance testing at lower viral load levels may be useful to guide timely treatment switches, although data on the clinical utility of this remain limited. We report here the influence of viral load levels on the probability of detecting drug resistance mutations (DRMs) and other mutations by routine genotypic testing in a large multicentre European cohort, with a focus on tests performed at a viral load <1000 copies/mL. Methods: A total of 16511 HIV-1 reverse transcriptase and protease sequences from 11492 treatment-experienced …
A novel methodology for large-scale phylogeny partition
Understanding the determinants of virus transmission is a fundamental step for effective design of screening and intervention strategies to control viral epidemics. Phylogenetic analysis can be a valid approach for the identification of transmission chains, and very-large data sets can be analysed through parallel computation. Here we propose and validate a new methodology for the partition of large-scale phylogenies and the inference of transmission clusters. This approach, on the basis of a depth-first search algorithm, conjugates the evaluation of node reliability, tree topology and patristic distance analysis. The method has been applied to identify transmission clusters of a phylogeny …