Outsmarting HIV With Sys Bio

A team of computational biologists and infectious disease scientists have developed methods to estimate the genetic diversity of virus populations within a single host. Publishing their results recently in PLoS Computational Biology, the researchers used computational analyses on pyrosequencing data from HIV patients with drug-resistant virus strains, and comparing these to 165 sequences of four independent HIV populations, were able to reconstruct the viral population. They hope to apply their methods to vaccine design and antiviral drug therapy.