Outbreaks of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in Two Hospitals Initiated by a Single Patient in Daejeon, South Korea

Park, Sun Hee; Kim, Yeon-Sook; Jung, Younghee; Choi, Soo young; Cho, Nam-Hyuk; Jeong, Hye Won; Heo, Jung Yeon; Yoon, Ji Hyun; Lee, Jacob; Cheon, Shinhye; Sohn, Kyung Mok

Total RNAs were extracted from respiratory tract samples obtained from the index case as well as four secondary cases and one tertiary case from each hospital. The partial S2 domain of the MERS-CoV spike (corresponding to nucleotides 23781-24395 of the MERS-CoV EMC genome JX869059) was amplified from the extracted RNAs using primers VS804 (5'-TCAGGTTGATCAACTTAATAGT-3') and VS805 (5'-TT-GAGTAATGCCAACACCGTT-3') [13] . The 11 new partial S2 sequences from this cluster were aligned with those of 20 published MERS-CoV genomes including two MERS-CoV strains isolated from Korean patients [12] [13] [14] [15] (Supplementary Table 2 ) using the MUSCLE method [13] implemented in Molecular Evolution Genetics Analysis, software version 6 [16] . A PhyML tree was generated using Seaview4 software [17] and the approximate likelihood ratio test based on a Shimodaira-Hasegawa-like procedure was applied using the general time-reversible substitution model, as previously described [13] .