The developmental pathway of Env-specific antibodies has been probed previously using high-throughput sequencing (Bonsignori et al., 2016, Doria-Rose et al., 2014, Huang et al., 2016, Liao et al., 2013, Wu et al., 2011), but such analyses have focused on single broadly neutralizing antibody (bNAb) lineages after infection. The gene discussed is ERVW-1; the disease is infection.