hugocastelan/HIV_Ghana

Introductions of HIV in Ghana ## Molecular epidemiology, evolution and transmission dynamics of HIV-1 in Ghana, West Africa Identification of the introduction of subtype HIV-1 CRF02_AG, in Ghana Billal Musah Obeng 1,2 , Hugo Gildardo Castelán Sánchez 3 , Akua Koaso Yalley 4 , Makafui Seshie 4 , Kwamena WC Sagoe 4 , Nicholas Israel Nii-Trebi 4 1 Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, School of Biomedical and Allied Health Sciences, University of Ghana. 2 Immunovirology and Pathogenesis Program, School of Medicine and Health, University of New South Wales, Australia. 3 Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Western University, London, Ontario Canada. 4 Department of Medical Laboratory Sciences, School of Biomedical and Allied Health Sciences, University of Ghana. **The data are available at the following Zenodo link:** **The firts version of the preprint is avalible here:** researchsquare.com **Abstract** Reconstructing the origins and transmission of the HIV epidemic in Ghana has, since the first diagnosis in 1986, yet to be reported. This study described the transmission clusters of HIV in the Ghanaian setting using a maximum-likelihood tree via the IQTree approach. Using 71 newly described full-length Ghanaian HIV-1 sequences, we performed molecular phylodynamic analysis to determine major drivers of HIV transmission in Ghana, a West African population where the HIV-1 CRF02_AG recombinant is prevalent. However, to reconstruct the origin of the most predominant subtype CRF02_AG, we combined 48 CRF02_AG sequences in our dataset with 140 full-length CRF02_AG sequences downloaded from the Los Alamos National Laboratory HIV database and utilized the ancestral trait reconstruction model in BEAST v.1.10.5 to reconstruct an MCC tree, summarized in TreeAnnotator and visualized with treeio package in R. Phylogeographic reconstruction to estimate the earliest introduction of HIV-1 showed that Cameroon and Nigeria were the sources of nine …