Particle infectivity of HIV-1 full-length genome infectious molecular clones in a subtype C heterosexual transmission pair following high fidelity amplification and unbiased cloning

•Our novel methodology demonstrates accurate amplification and cloning of full-length HIV-1 genomes.•A majority of plasma derived HIV variants from a chronically infected individual are infectious.•The transmitted/founder was more infectious than the majority of the variants from the chronically infected donor.

The high genetic diversity of HIV-1 impedes high throughput, large-scale sequencing and full-length genome cloning by common restriction enzyme based methods. Applying novel methods that employ a high-fidelity polymerase for amplification and an unbiased fusion-based cloning strategy, we have generated several HIV-1 full-length genome infectious molecular clones from an epidemiologically linked transmission pair. These clones represent the transmitted/founder virus and phylogenetically diverse non-transmitted variants from the chronically infected individual׳s diverse quasispecies near the time of transmission. We demonstrate that, using this approach, PCR-induced mutations in full-length clones derived from their cognate single genome amplicons are rare. Furthermore, all eight non-transmitted genomes tested produced functional virus with a range of infectivities, belying the previous assumption that a majority of circulating viruses in chronic HIV-1 infection are defective. Thus, these methods provide important tools to update protocols in molecular biology that can be universally applied to the study of human viral pathogens.