Discoveries by AIDS researcher Brandon F. Keele, Ph.D. have not only put him on the leading edge of research to prevent and treat HIV infection. He’s also influenced the work of his peers.

Keele continues to study HIV transmission and how to block it, in rhesus macaques. His team has engineered simian/human immunodeficiency viruses (SHIVs) for HIV prevention and treatment studies. The SHIVs are engineered to imitate HIV as closely as possible for use in the laboratory models of the disease.

Keele and colleagues attached a bar code – much like you’d find on the bottom of a cereal box – to more than 1,000 different lineages of simian immunodeficiency virus, an HIV-like virus that infects rhesus macaques. As each virus grew and mutated, it carried the unique genetic tag with it, allowing the team to track each viral lineage over time and in different tissues.

Previous studies by Keele and others show HIV infection is established by a single founder virus. As the immune system puts pressure on the virus, it rapidly mutates. Genetic barcoding allowed Keele and colleagues to quantify that pressure and determine how close the virus came to dying off.