Effects of Korean Red Ginseng and HAART on vif Gene in 10 Long-Term Slow Progressors over 20 Years: High Frequency of Deletions and G-to-A Hypermutation

Figure 2

Sequential alignment of the amino acids of the Vif protein over 20 years. All sequences that demonstrated small in-frame deletions, gross deletions, and stop codons are depicted together with the baseline and last sequences of each patient. Patients 90-18 demonstrated a 9 bp deletion (positions 182–184) in April 1998, and patient 92-13 demonstrated a 12 bp deletion (positions 185–188) in May 2005. Patient 90-05 consistently demonstrated a 9 bp insertion (RQTRAR-RAR-NGASRP) at the same position at the terminus of vpr beginning in August 2000 (data not shown). The code 92LSH3-6951 (sampling year, initials of the patient, sampling month, and sequence number) denotes that the sampling date is March 1992 and the sequence number is 6951 in patient LSH (90-18). The dot (⋅), hyphen (-), and asterisk (*) denote sequence identity, deletions, and premature stop codons, respectively, compared with the Korean consensus [20]. In the right column, the plus (+) and minus (−) signs denote the presence or absence of the corresponding therapy, respectively.