Comparative genomics of hepatitis A virus, hepatitis C virus, and hepatitis E virus provides insights into the evolutionary history of Hepatovirus species

Wassenaar, Trudy M.; Jun, Se-Ran; Robeson, Michael; Ussery, David W.

Bacteriophages with an ssRNA (+) genome have been described, for instance bacteriophage MS2, which infects Escherichia coli and other members of Enterobacteriaceae. It is an icosahedral virus, just like HAV is. Another example is phage AP205 that propagates in Acinetobacter species (Klovins, Overbeek, Worm, Ackermann, & Duin, 2002) . Single-strand RNA bacteriophages are typically members of the Leviviridae family (Olsthoorn & van Duin, 2011) that bear no sequence resemblance to HAV. So far, a bacteriophage with structural or sequence similarity to HAV has not been described, but it should be noted that RNA phages have not been extensively studied or described, and this type of bacteriophages suffers from underreporting (Callanan et al., 2018) .