Reinosa, R.; Hernandez-Walias, F. J.

Motivation: The pathological differentiation in humans between HTLV-1 and HTLV-2 viruses is due, among other parameters, to the variability in a viral protein, Tax (Tax1 and Tax2 respectively), with the second virus being a candidate to interfere with HIV-1 infection, which has allowed us to assess the importance of further investigating Tax. Results: Both the degree of conservation and the genomic and protein variability between Tax1 and Tax2 have been expressed in this work through bioinformatics tools. The knowledge about Tax2 related to the interfering capacity on HIV-1 compared to the absence of such a function in Tax1 is corroborated with our analyses, highlighting certain variations between both sequences that could explain the functional differences in pathogenicity that we show in this work.