A diagnostic HIV-1 tropism system based on sequence relatedness. Journal of Clinical Microbiology
Edwards et al. presented a new diagnostic HIV tropism test (XTrack) for complementing and improving the diagnostic genotype-based tropism determination of HIV for clinical use. They found a high concordance with the commercial TrofileES test (84.9%) and the Web-based tool Geno2Pheno (83.0%). Moreover, the new system reveals mixed virus populations, and it was successful on specimens with low virus loads or on provirus from leukocytes. Based on these data the XTrack test is favorably suitable for routine diagnostics.
The authors expect that the same test principle may also be applicable toward new pathogens, such as hepatitis viruses and other genetically highly variable entities.