Dr. Hahn's laboratory has a long-standing interest in elucidating the origins and evolution of human and simian immunodeficiency viruses, and in studying HIV/SIV gene function and disease mechanisms from an evolutionary perspective. Dr. Hahn was the first to molecularly clone HIV-1 (Hahn, B.H., et al., Nature, 312:166-169,1984) and to describe its extensive in vivo genetic variability (Hahn, B.H., et al., PNAS, 82:4813-4817,1985; Hahn, B.H., et al., Science, 232:1548-1553,1986) which is now recognized as the source of drug and immune escape mutants. Her group also provided evidence for the sooty mangabey origin of HIV-2 (Gao, F., et al., Nature, 358:495-499,1992), and discovered that cross-species transmission and recombination represent a major driving force of HIV/SIV diversification (e.g., Jin, M.J., et al., EMBO J, 13:2935-2947,1994; Robertson, D.L., et al., Nature, 374:124-126,1995; Sharp, P.M., et al., Nature, 383:586-587,1996).

In 1999, Dr. Hahn's group discovered the origin of HIV-1 in west central African chimpanzees (Gao, F., et al., Nature, 397:436-441,1999), and in collaboration with Dr. Korber (Los Alamos National Laboratories) provided a time estimate for the onset of the HIV-1 group M pandemic (Korber, B.T., et al., Science, 288:1789-1796,2000). These findings led to new insights into the zoonotic origins of HIV and a heightened awareness of the extent and diversity of SIV in African primates (Hahn, B.H., et al., Science, 287:607-614,2000). More recently, Dr. Hahn’s team developed non-invasive methods to detect SIV infection in endangered primates in the wild (Santiago, M.L., et al., Science, 295:465,2002). This opened an entirely new field of study, i.e., prevalence estimations and molecular analyses of SIV by entirely non-invasive means (e.g., Santiago, M.L., et al., J. Virol., 77:2233-2242, 2003; Santiago, M.L., et al., J. Virol., 77:7545-7562, 2003). These findings led to collaborative work with Dr. Sharp (University of Nottingham) which revealed that SIVcpz itself (the progenitor of HIV-1) arose by cross-species transmission and recombination of SIVs infecting monkeys on which chimpanzees prey (Bailes, E., et al., Science, 300:1713,2003).

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