First Identification of Human Adenovirus Subtype 21a in China With MinION and Illumina Sequencers

Ye, Fuqiang; Han, Yifang; Zhu, Juanjuan; Li, Peng; Zhang, Qi; Lin, Yanfeng; Wang, Taiwu; Lv, Heng; Wang, Changjun; Wang, Chunhui; Zhang, Jinhai

Human adenovirus type 21 infections or respiratory outbreaks have been reported in Germany (Hage et al., 2014) , Denmark (Barnadas et al., 2018) , Switzerland (Pfortmueller et al., 2019) , Argentina (Barrero et al., 2012) , and the United States (Kajon et al., 2015; Scott et al., 2016) . However, respiratory infections due to HAdV21 or related strains have rarely been reported in China to date. In this study, MinION and Illumina sequencers were used to obtain HAdV21 genome sequences from viral cultures of a swab sample from a patient with respiratory tract infection. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) products were then used to validate and correct discrepancies between MinION and Illumina sequencing. The genomic characterization and phylogenetic analysis were further performed with the corrected HAdV21a genome.