Feline coronavirus isolates from a part of Brazil: insights into molecular epidemiology and phylogeny inferred from the 7b gene

MYRRHA, Luciana Wanderley; SILVA, Fernanda Miquelitto Figueira; VIDIGAL, Pedro Marcus Pereira; RESENDE, Maurício; BRESSAN, Gustavo Costa; FIETTO, Juliana Lopes Rangel; SANTOS, Marcus Rebouças; SILVA, Laura Morais Nascimento; ASSAO, Viviane Sisdelli; SILVA-JÚNIOR, Abelardo; de ALMEIDA, Márcia Rogéria

To describe the correlation between geographic location, virulence of strains, and genealogy estimated by Bayesian analyses, summary statistics were calculated by BaTS [22] (Tables 1 and 2 ) that correlate the viral phenotypic characters with the shared ancestry (represented by the phylogenetic tree). This correlation was measured by computation of the association index (AI) [33] , parsimony score (PS) [27] , and maximum monophyletic clade size (MC) [22] . The AI and PS test the association between traits (geographic distribution and virulence) and tree topology. The MC index tests whether traits are associated with phylogeny. Stronger phylogeny-trait associations should produce larger monophyletic clades (MC) sharing the same trait [22] .