First Identification of a Novel HIV-1 CRF80_0107/B Recombinant Form Among Men Who Have Sex with Men in Hebei Province, China

The emergence of CRF80_0107 resulted from recombination between co-circulating CRF01_AE and CRF07_BC genotypes. To date, no secondary recombinants involving CRF80_0107 as a parental strain have been documented in public sequence databases. Here, we report the identification and characterization of a novel HIV-1 CRF80_0107/B recombinant form isolated from a treatment-naïve men who have sex with men (MSM) individual in Baoding City, Hebei Province, China. While phylogenetic analysis of the near-full-length genome revealed clustering with the CRF80_0107 lineage, Bootscan and similarity-mapping analyses (RIP 3.0) identified a recombinant structure containing inserted B subtype fragments spanning the <i>env</i>, <i>nef</i>, and 3'LTR regions (HXB2: 7,907-9,342 nt). This represents the first documented CRF80_0107/B strain in the MSM population of northern China, highlighting the need for expanded molecular surveillance to track evolving HIV-1 diversity in this key population.