Simulating within host human immunodeficiency virus 1 genome evolution in the persistent reservoir

The complexities of viral evolution can be difficult to elucidate. Software simulating viral evolution provides powerful tools for exploring hypotheses of viral systems, especially in situations where thorough empirical data are difficult to obtain or parameters of interest are difficult to measure. Human immunodeficiency virus 1 (HIV-1) infection has no durable cure; this is primarily due to the virus’ ability to integrate into the genome of host cells, where it can remain in a transcriptionally latent state. An effective cure strategy must eliminate every copy of HIV-1 in this ‘persistent reservoir’ because proviruses can reactivate, even decades later, to resume an active infection. However, many features of the persistent reservoir remain unclear, including the temporal dynamics of HIV-1 integration frequency and the longevity of the resulting reservoir. Thus, sophisticated analyses are required to measure these features and determine their temporal dynamics. Here, we present software that is an extension of SANTA-SIM to include multiple compartments of viral populations. We used the resulting software to create a model of HIV-1 within host evolution that incorporates the persistent HIV-1 reservoir. This model is composed of two compartments, an active compartment and a latent compartment. With this model, we compared five different date estimation methods (Closest Sequence, Clade, Linear Regression, Least Squares, and Maximum Likelihood) to recover the integration dates of genomes in our model’s HIV-1 reservoir. We found that the Least Squares method performed the best with the highest concordance (0.80) between real and estimated dates and the lowest absolute error (all pairwise t tests: P < 0.01). Our software is a useful tool for validating bioinformatics software and understanding the dynamics of the persistent HIV-1 reservoir.