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

The circulation of human adenovirus type 21 (HAdV21) has been mainly documented in care facilities, military hospitals, or military recruit training centers (Hage et al., 2014; Kajon et al., 2015; Scott et al., 2016; Philo et al., 2018; Pfortmueller et al., 2019) . Human adenovirus type 21 can cause upper respiratory tract infection, pneumonia, hemorrhagic cystitis, myocarditis, and encephalitis. There are currently three HAdV21 subtypes according to the restriction enzyme analysis (REA), HAdV subtype 21a (HAdV21a), HAdV21b, and HAdV21p (Kajon et al., 2015) . As noted above, HAdV21 commonly leads to mild clinical symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, nausea, rhinorrhea, and myalgia (Scott et al., 2016) . However, HAdV21a is linked to severe pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome, with some fatal outcomes (Hage et al., 2014; Pfortmueller et al., 2019) .