Characterization of a Novel RNA Virus Discovered in the Autumnal Moth Epirrita autumnata in Sweden

de Miranda, Joachim R.; Hedman, Harald; Onorati, Piero; Stephan, Jörg; Karlberg, Olof; Bylund, Helena; Terenius, Olle

The predicted Abisko virus ORF1 and ORF2 amino acid sequences were queried with BLAST-P using default settings against the GenBank repository of non-redundant translated nucleotide sequences (nr database) at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov, identifying key viral amino acid motifs and a close similarity with negeviruses, ciliviruses and members of the Virgaviridae. For each unique virus taxon identified by BLAST-P, a single accession (Supplementary Materials Table S2 ) was extracted for multiple amino acid sequence alignment using COBALT [14] . The phylogenetic relationships between the viruses were inferred from this alignment using the Maximum Likelihood method based on the JTT matrix-based model [15] , as implemented by MEGA6 [16] . All positions containing gaps and missing data were eliminated, resulting in 891 characters for analysis. Initial tree(s) for the heuristic search were obtained automatically by applying Neighbor-Join and BioNJ algorithms to a matrix of pairwise distances estimated using a JTT model, and then selecting the topology with superior log likelihood value. Statistical support for each node was determined by bootstrap analysis involving 1000 replicates [17] . The Abisko virus consensus sequence has been deposited at GenBank under accession KY662294. The partial Abisko virus sequences of the PCR fragments from the positive adult samples have been deposited under accessions MF001122-MF001125.