Supercomputer hunts HIV vaccine targets

LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Oct. 29 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they're using the world's fastest supercomputer in an effort to create the world's largest human immunodeficiency virus evolutionary tree.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, as part of the International Center for HIV/AIDS Vaccine Immunology Consortium, are using an IBM Roadrunner supercomputer to analyze vast quantities of genetic sequences from HIV infected people in the hope of identifying possible vaccine target areas.

Physicist Tanmoy Bhattacharya and HIV researcher Bette Korber said they used samples taken from both chronic and acute HIV patients around the world to look for similarities in the acute versus chronic sequences that might identify areas where vaccines would be most effective.

In the study the evolutionary history of more than 10,000 sequences from more than 400 HIV-infected individuals was compared.

"The petascale supercomputer gives us the capacity to look for similarities across whole populations of acute patients," Bhattacharya said. "At this scale we can begin to figure out the relationships between chronic and acute infections using statistics to determine the interconnecting branches – and it is these interconnections where a specially-designed vaccine might be most effective."