LETTER TO THE EDITOR: SEQUENCE ANALYSIS OF THE M GENOME SEGMENT OF TWO SEOUL VIRUS ISOLATES FROM SHANDONG PROVINCE, CHINA

摘要

Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) and hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) are rodent-borne viral zoonoses caused by hantaviruses (the genus Hantavirus, the family Bunyaviridae). Hantaviruses have a tripartite, negative-strand RNA genome, ofwhich the small (S), medium (M) and large (L) segments encode nucleo-capsid protein (N protein), glycoproteins (Gn and Gc), and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (L protein), respectively (7). More than 20 hantavirus genotypes with specific main rodent hostshave been identified so far (2). Rattus norvégiens (brown rat) is the primary reservoir of Seoul virus (SEOV) (3). In China, HFRS caused by Hantaan virus (HTNV) and SEOV has a broad scope of prevalence. Ninety percent of the total cases worldwide haveoccurred in China (4, 5). Shandong Province, one of 31 provinces of China, is an area of very severe HFRS epidemics with about one third of total cases in China, and its annual HFRS incidence rate is consistently among the top three in China (5). Since 1981, many hantavirus isolates have been characterized genetically and by restriction and sequence analyses of 300-nts regions of M segments (3,6). Only the sequences of M segments ofabout 7 Chinese SEOV isolates, which did not originate from Shandong Province and were isolated mostly before 1990, have been sequenced over 2000 nts. In order to obtain an up-to-date information on SEOVs from Shandong Province, we cloned, sequenced andphylogenetically analyzed 2353-nts regions of M segments of two SEOV isolates (ZB8 and GM04-38) from Shandong Province.