Epidemiology of human adenovirus and molecular characterization of human adenovirus 55 in China, 2009–2012

Lu, Qing-Bin; Tong, Yi-Gang; Wo, Ying; Wang, Hong-Yu; Liu, En-Mei; Gray, Gregory C; Liu, Wei; Cao, Wu-Chun

The partial hexon gene covering hypervariation regions 1-7 (nt 18353-20956, corresponding to the QS-DLL strain) and fiber gene (nt 30817-31752) were successfully amplified from all the six samples, yielding 2604-bp and 954-bp amplicon, respectively. The sequence homologies of the six HAdV-55 strains were 99Á8-100% for the hexon gene and 99Á9-100% for the fiber gene, respectively. Phylogenetic analyses based on hexon gene and fiber gene revealed the HAdV strains in Chongqing clustered with HAdV-55 ( Figure 1 ). Figure 1A shows that all these hexon genes obtained in this study clustered with HAdV-11 and exhibit the highest degree of nucleotide sequence identity with the strains in Singapore and USA, but different from the strains in Spain and Taiwan with the 1000 bootstraps supporting. Figure 1B demonstrates all these fiber strains from the mainland of China strains clustered with HAdV-14 strain as the expected appearance and form a separate branch, different from Taiwan and Singapore strains with the 897 bootstraps supporting. The phylogenetic trees based on hexon and fiber gene at amino acid level were also demonstrated in Figure S1 , which were the same to those at nucleic acid level.