> From: "Patrick O'Neil" <patrick at corona>
> Subject: Re: HIV-1 vs HIV-2
> On 15 Mar 1995, Gary Ross wrote:
>> > Hi. I am a biologist but have been working out of field for
> > about seven years. Can someone give me a brief(?) rundown on
> > HIV-1 vs HIV-2 viruses?
> >
>> HIV in general appears to have jumped into humans from Gabonese
mandrills> from 1 to 2 centuries ago. From this jump, the two HIV
strains diverged,
...
> The most parsimonious scenario of all has an HIV ancestor
incubating > within human populations for about a thousand years or
so, with jumps > into various simian lines within the last few
centuries.
Whaaaaaaaat? Says who?! All of a sudden, HIV has been in HUMANS
for a thousand odd years, and gets BACK into simians??
Surely a most parsimonious explanation is that HIVs separated in
simians, and went merrily along until humans were infected in recent
times? Far mor eparsimonious than postualting all of the jumps into
monkeys that would have been necessary to acccount for all of the
SIVs, several of which are quite divergent. And some of which, I
might point out, don't cause immunodeficiency disease in their
natural hosts - indicating a better adaptation to these than to
other hosts, such as lab monkeys.
_____________________________________________________
| Ed Rybicki, PhD | (ed at molbiol.uct.ac.za) |
| Dept Microbiology | University of Cape Town |
| Private Bag, Rondebosch | 7700, South Africa |
| fax: xx27-21-650 4023 | tel: xx27-21-650 3265 |
| URL: http://www.uct.ac.za/microbiology |
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