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HIV type 1 tat gene heteroduplex mobility assay as a tool to establish epidemiologic relationships among HIV type 1-infected individuals.

Molecular biology techniques are increasingly used to study the molecular epidemiology of infectious diseases. Most of these methods are expensive and labor-intensive. The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has substantial genomic variation, such that HIVs from different individuals are genetically diverse, although mutation rates differ for distinct regions of the genome. Most studies of HIV linkage and molecular evolution have focused on env or gag regions. We show that heteroduplex mobility analysis of the first exon of the HIV tat gene provides a simple, rapid, inexpensive, and reliable discriminatory tool for the molecular differentiation of shared versus distinct HIV-1 quasispecies when epidemiologic relations need to be defined. tat, as a relatively conserved region, appears to be a better region than the more variable env region to establish HIV-1 epidemiological linkages.