HIV has presented some of the greatest biomedical challenges in recent decades, and an understanding of how the virus behaves when it is in the human body is critical to addressing many of these challenges. One avenue through which to do this is the study of host genetics, which investigates the human genetic variants that modify the interactions between the HIV-1 virus and the human body. In my graduate work, I performed several different investigations that have furthered our understanding of the human genetic variants that either modulate the response to HIV-1 infection or play a role in the acquisition of an HIV-1 infection. This work took place at a time of transition in human genetics, and spanned both the era of genome-wide association studies as well as the beginning of the sequencing and rare variant eras.

The earliest HIV-1 host genetics findings were made through candidate gene studies, which reflected the state of human genetics research in the 1990s and early 2000s. The draft sequence of the human genome was released in 2001, and HIV host genetics, as well as human genetics in general, has changed considerably since then. Chapter 1 describes the basics of HIV-1 biology and the HIV-1 epidemic, as well as some crucial findings in HIV-1 host genetics. This chapter also gives a brief recent history of human genetics and describes some of the current challenges in the field.

Chapters 2 and 3 describe the identification of human genetic variants that associate with viral load set point. Chapter 2 describes a copy number variable region (CNV) in the KIR region of the genome that associates with a change in set point...