Journal: mBio
Article Title: Gene duplication, gene loss, and recombination events with variola virus shaped the complex evolutionary path of historical American horsepox-based smallpox vaccines
doi: 10.1128/mbio.01887-23
Figure Lengend Snippet: Recombination in the variable region at the left end of the VK02 genome. ( A ) The multialignment of the variable region at the left end of the genomes of the six historical smallpox vaccines and HPXV_MNR-76 was scanned for percent similarity using Simplot, using the HPXV_MNR-76 sequence as query, window size 500, step size 50. Black arrows indicate the two regions of least similarity between VK02 and all other sequences, including HPXV_MNR-76. In one of the regions, in addition to VK02, MFDV_1902 also shares low similarity with the other viruses. ( B ) The multialignment included five variola virus strains and excluded all historical vaccines, except VK02 and VK08. Simplot was used with similar parameters, using VK02 as the query. Black arrows indicate regions 6A and 6B of least similarity between VK02 and both HPXV and VK08, and of highest similarity between VK02 and variola virus. ( C ) The first 4.5 kb of the multialignment shown in panel B was analyzed by Bootscan, using VK02 as query, window size 300, and step size 30. The two putative recombinant regions with VARV 6A and 6B are indicated. The VK02 sequences between recombination breakpoints were extracted and realigned with several orthopoxviruses for phylogenetic analysis using either maximum likelihood or neighbor-joining models. Blue boxes indicate the HPXV and HPXV-related cluster, and pink boxes indicate the VARV cluster. The position of VK02 in the trees is indicated by a red star. The numbers indicate the bootstrap support of 1,000 replicates (>50% is shown). The scale bar indicates the number of substitutions per site.
Article Snippet: Putative recombination regions were analyzed using the Bootscan tool implemented in Simplot v.3.5.1 with the same parameters described above and the neighbor-joining tree model.
Techniques: Vaccines, Sequencing, Virus, Recombinant