West Nile Virus Positive Blood Donation and Subsequent Entomological Investigation, Austria, 2014

Kolodziejek, Jolanta; Seidel, Bernhard; Jungbauer, Christof; Dimmel, Katharina; Kolodziejek, Michael; Rudolf, Ivo; Hubálek, Zdenek; Allerberger, Franz; Nowotny, Norbert

Markers associated with increased pathogenicity and neuroinvasiveness could be identified in all Austrian WNV strains and isolates: three potential N-glycosylation sites at positions N-130, N-175, and N-207 [15] and proline at position 250 of the NS1 gene [17] . Proline at The sequences determined in this study are marked with a red diamond (Viennese blood donor-derived WNV) and a black diamond (Viennese Culex pipiens-derived WNV), respectively. The Austrian goshawk-derived sequence from 2008 is marked with a contoured diamond. Five major clades and six clusters among clade 2d are indicated. Group 2d-1 contains the Central/Southern European viruses including Austrian strains, and group 2d-5 consists of the Eastern European WNVs. The phylogenetic tree was constructed using the NJ method with MCL algorithm of MEGA6 [19] with 1,000-fold bootstrap analysis. GenBank accession numbers, strain names, and (if known) species, countries of origins and years of isolations are indicated at the branches. Supporting bootstrap values >80% (the percentage of replicates in the bootstrap analysis) are displayed next to the nodes. The horizontal scale bar indicates genetic distances (here 2% nucleotide sequence divergence).