Detection and Characterization of Homologues of Human Hepatitis Viruses and Pegiviruses in Rodents and Bats in Vietnam

Van Nguyen, Dung; Van Nguyen, Cuong; Bonsall, David; Ngo, Tue Tri; Carrique-Mas, Juan; Pham, Anh Hong; Bryant, Juliet E.; Thwaites, Guy; Baker, Stephen; Woolhouse, Mark; Simmonds, Peter

In contrast to host specificity of rodent hepaciviruses, the 15 HEV sequences (284 nucleotides) from four rodent species were 84.4-99.3% identical to each other and phylogenetically interspersed with each other and with reference sequences from other rat species (Figure 3a) . The obtained complete genome of rat HEV comprised of 6960 nucleotides excluding the poly A tail. Its concatenated ORF1 and ORF2 differed by 6.8% (Table 2 ) at amino acid level to the closest match (JX120573) and these two sequences therefore belong to a same genotype in the species Orthohepevirus C (Figure 3b) , according to the latest proposal for classification of hepeviruses [34] .