Genetics of both virus and patient work together to influence the course of HIV infection
People with HIV experience different rates of disease progression. HIV progresses faster in people with a higher viral load -- the amount of genetic material from the HIV virus found in an infected person's blood. Previous research has shown that an infected person's genetics and the genetics of their particular HIV strain both influence viral load. István Bartha of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and colleagues are now the first scientists to investigate the relative impacts of human and viral genetics on viral load within the same group of patients. The researchers collected patient and viral genetic data from 541 people with HIV. They used a computational modeling method known as linear mixed modeling to determine how human and viral genetics might explain differences in viral load between the patients. They found that genetic differences between HIV strains explain 29 percent of differences in viral load between patients, while human geneti...