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.

A full explanation for the observations regarding HAV cannot be given, but it opens the intriguing possibility that HAV, its close relatives simian, rodent, and bat hepatovirus, and the insect virus species analyzed here are somehow related, and might even have shared a common ancestor. That ancestor might have been an insect virus that underwent a host jump to bats, after it was passed on to rodents and eventually simians and humans. The jump from insect to bat may have occurred in the blood (in case a blood-sucking insect was the source) or in the gut of insectivorous bats. A candidate for this putative common ancestor has not been identified, as no invertebrate virus is yet described with sequence similarity to HAV, but its existence can be hypothesized. In contrast, HEV and HCV seem to have a common ancestor not related to that of HAV and form a different group of (human) ssRNA (