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iayork t1_iwg416j wrote

It's extremely unlikely that any strain of HIV will evade detection by either PCR or antibodies.

You probably misunderstand what's meant when we say HIV mutates a huge amount. Parts of the virus certainly do change wildly. but there are parts of it that stay very constant ("conserved"). And those parts have to stay constant, because they're what makes the virus a virus.

You can take a motorcycle and change its paint, swap out the handlebars, change the tires. You can even wrap it up in some lightweight costume and make it look like an X-wing starfighter for a parade, if you want. But if you pull out the pistons, or replace them with spaghetti, you don't have a functional motorcycle any more.

Tests for HIV don't depend on the equivalent of paint color or handlebars, they look for the functional components of the virus without which the virus can't replicate. For example, PCR tests often look for the Long Terminal Repeat (LTR), which are required for turning on the viral genes; these regions have minor variations, but can't change too much or the virus breaks.

The same is true with antibodies against HIV. Certainly there are antibodies against the rapidly-mutating regions, but for standard testing you don't look at those, you look at antibodies against the highly conserved regions.

(Why don't those antibodies against the highly conserved regions protect against HIV infection? Because, simplistically, many antibodies against any pathogen are not protective, and HIV has evolved so that the regions protective antibodies target do change rapidly.)

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badgerj t1_iwgirc1 wrote

This was brilliant! You had me at spaghetti! 🤪 Take this kind stranger!

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Savonlinna t1_iwhbb5z wrote

Are you missing a comma? If not, I feel I have to warn you: giving people away is generally frowned upon.

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BothObligation8722 t1_iwhyfp7 wrote

Yes extremely unlikely, but not certain. Several mutant CRF strains which standard tests are not developed for.

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GravitationalAurora t1_iwkizti wrote

I have a question;

(I'm a bachelor student of bioinformatics and I'm interested in these topics)

Some studies have shown that pathogenic retroviruses (for our immune cells) can infect fungi and bacterias as well, so if these kind of viruses go to the digestive system (specifically the large intestine) instead of blood vessels and somehow they find their suitable hosts among those microbiomes they can dominate there. So as long as they do not find their paths in blood they can be stealth even become as our normal flora (which means even body will support them) so these genomic based tests such as PCR can detect them? perhaps only stool exams? I mean at this situation the answer of this question is not "YES"?

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