Analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism among Varicella-Zoster Virus and identification of vaccine-specific sites.

Analysis of single nucleotide polymorphism among Varicella-Zoster Virus and identification of vaccine-specific sites. Virology. 2016 Jul 1;496:277-286 Authors: Jeon JS, Won YH, Kim IK, Ahn JH, Shin OS, Kim JH, Lee CH Abstract Varicella-zoster virus (VZV) is a causative agent for chickenpox and zoster. Live attenuated vaccines have been developed based on Oka and MAV/06 strains. In order to understand the molecular mechanisms of attenuation, complete genome sequences of vaccine and wild-type strains were compared and single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) was analyzed. ORF22 and ORF62 contained the highest number of SNPs. The detailed analysis of the SNPs suggested 24 potential vaccine-specific sites. All the mutational events found in vaccine-specific sites were transitional, and most of them were substitution of AT to GC pair. Interestingly, 18 of the vaccine-specific sites of the vaccine strains appeared to be genetically heterogeneous. The probability of a single genome of vaccine strain to contain all 24 vaccine-type sequences was calculated to be less than 4%. The average codon adaptation index (CAI) value of the vaccine strains was significantly lower than the CAI value of the clinical strains. PMID: 27376245 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]
Source: Virology - Category: Virology Authors: Tags: Virology Source Type: research