ERVW-1 and HIV-1 infection: While studies of paired DBS and plasma samples have reported concordant results for HIV-1 genotyping and viral load quantification [21, 22, 26, 27], no previous study has demonstrated the feasibility of using DBS to examine HIV-1 envelope (env) gene diversity in acute and chronic infection or identify the TF env or full-length genome during primary HIV-1 infection.