More than ten subtypes of Human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) have been identified and many inter subtype recombinant viruses have been isolated The genome of HIV-1 is a single-stranded positive sense RNA and is always found as dimers in virus particles Frequent recombination between two genomes during reverse trancription is often observed and thus reasonable to assume that genome dimerization controls viral genomic recombination Recently several reports indicated in vitro/in vivo data to support this idea In the study reported here in an attempt to show a comprehensive evidence we compared the efficiency of various inter-subtype dimerization and recombination and detected a near-complete correlation of the two functions This suggests that genome dimerization controls recombination and plays an important role in promoting the genetic diversity of HIV-1 in general We also investigated various inter subtype hetero-dimerization within HIV-1 virions and found that the dimer initiation site is a major but not the sole determinant of dimerization (and recombination) efficiency (C) 2010 Institut Pasteur Published by Elsevier Masson SAS All rights reserved