VARIABILITY ANALYSIS OF HIV-1 GP120 V2 REGION .2. HIERARCHY OF TAXONS

In the previous work (M. Yu. Shchelkanov, A., N. Yudin, A. V. Antonov, N. S. Starikov, A. A. Vedenov, E. V. Karamov, J. Biomol. Struct. Dyn. 15, 217-229 (1997)) we have introduced the amino acid distribution fu nction within HIV-1 taxons and Hamming-transformed Euclidean measures between their characteristics: consensus, subconsensus and sample mean . In this work the referred characteristics are used for hierarchical classification of amino acid sequences of gp120 V3 region belonging to different HIV-1 taxons. A comparative analysis of the results produce d by various classification methods is carried out. Multidimensional s caling of distance matrix for the specified characteristics is used to visualize the pattern of HIV-1 variability.