Loss of antibody reactivity directed against the V3 domain of certain human immunodeficiency virus type 1 variants during disease progression

Correlation of coreceptor usage and disease progression

“…Longitudinal studies are needed to properly assess the causal relationship between the switch in coreceptor tropism and disease progression. In line with this hypothesis is the observation that the V3 sequence significantly impacts the activity of neutralizing antibodies [64,65]. Patients were selected to reflect the full spectrum of rates of disease progression, and coreceptor tropism was assessed using the OTA.…”

Molecular Evolution of Human Immunodeficiency Virus env in Humans and Monkeys: Similar Patterns Occur during Natural Disease Progression or Rapid Virus Passage

“…3). Many mutations were located in V3, a region that contains linear and discontinuous antigenic determinants (9,18,39) that can change during disease development and immune escape (37,38,41). Some amino acid substitutions led to three new and loss of two potential N-linked glycosylation sites, which in turn might result in changes in conformation and immune recognition of gp120 (3,12,14,29,30,35,47,50).…”

Escape of HIV-1 is associated with lack of V3 domain-specific antibodies in vivo

“…In contrast to the iCFV, these non-iCFV variants were regularly recognized by highly specific V3 antibodies. Furthermore, we demonstrated that lack of these V3-specific antibodies is the result of the continuous loss of this antibody specificity during disease progression [22].…”

“…This high specificity was not observed with short peptides spanning the identical V3 sequences (pep-scan analysis, data not shown). Thus the synthesis of the full-length V3 loop is needed to detect differences in the V3 antibody response [21,22]. In humans, progression of the disease was shown to correlate with env-directed or V3-directed homologous antibodies [29] or with loss of neutralizing antibody titres [30][31][32].…”