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Our ability to prevent communicable disease epidemics depends on knowing how they begin. Understanding of the start of the North American AIDS epidemic has been limited by a lack of HIV genome sequence data from U.S. patients prior to 1980. Now, a team of investigators have used a novel sequencing approach to obtain such data.
The researchers performed HIV serological screening and subsequent genomic sequencing of archived serum samples that were obtained in 1978 and 1979 from cohorts of men who had sex with men in New York City (NYC) and San Francisco (SF). To compensate for RNA decay caused by long-term storage, the team used a novel “jackhammering” approach to enhance recovery of genomic sequences. Applying this technique on 116 samples y…