1990 Volume 34 Issue 12 Pages 1055-1063
To know the biological significance of the HIV variation, we investigated the interaction between two different HIV clones. Two distinct clones were mixed and propagated by infecting MT-4 cells. After passaging the mixture viruses 8 times, and cloning by the plaque method, we obtained not only viruses of homogeneous type like each parental clone but also heterogeneous-type viruses which showed a mixture of two parental viruses with regard to phenotype and genotype. To further segregate a single virus from the mixture, we recloned the heterogeneous viruses using the plaque method. We found that about 40% of recloned viruses from heterogeneous-type viruses were still heterogeneous.