Unravelling the history of hepatitis B virus genotypes A and D infection using a full-genome phylogenetic and phylogeographic approach
Abstract
Hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection constitutes a global public health problem. In order to establish how HBV was disseminated across different geographic regions, we estimated the levels of regional clustering for genotypes D and A. We used 916 HBV-D and 493 HBV-A full-length sequences to reconstruct their global phylogeny. Phylogeographic analysis was conducted by reconstruction of ancestral states using the criterion of parsimony. The putative origin of genotype D was in North Africa/Middle East. HBV-D sequences form low levels of regional clustering for the Middle East and Southern Europe. In contrast, HBV-A sequences form two major clusters, the first including sequences mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, and the second including sequences mostly from Western and Central Europe. Conclusion: We observed considerable differences in the global dissemination patterns of HBV-D and HBV-A and different levels of monophyletic clustering in relation to the regions of prevalence of each genotype.
Data availability
All data (sequence alignments and additional pieces of information related to the accession numbers of sequences and their sampling areas) are available at Dryad (doi: 10.5061/dryad.bt4q242).
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Data from: Unravelling the history of hepatitis B virus genotypes A and D infection using a full-genome phylogenetic and phylogeographic approachAvailable at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Hellenic Scientific Society for the Study of AIDS and STDs
- Evangelia-Georgia Kostaki
- Timokratis Karamitros
- Garyfallia Stefanou
- Ioannis Mamais
- Konstantinos Angelis
- Angelos Hatzakis
- Anna Kramvis
- Dimitrios Paraskevis
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2018, Kostaki et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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