Phylogenetic analysis of West Nile Virus in Maricopa County, Arizona: Evidence for dynamic behavior of strains in two major lineages in the American Southwest.

ABSTRACT: West Nile Virus (WNV) has been detected annually in Maricopa County, Arizona, since 2003. With this in mind, we sought to determine if contemporary strains are endemic to the county or are annually imported. As part of this effort, we developed a new protocol for tiled amplicon sequencing of WNV to efficiently attain greater than 99% coverage of 14 WNV genomes collected directly from positive mosquito pools distributed throughout Maricopa County between 2014 and 2017. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses revealed that contemporary genomes fall within two major lineages; NA/WN02 and SW/WN03. We found that all of the Arizona strains possessed an amino acid substitution known to be under positive selection, which has arisen independently at least four times in Arizona. The SW/WN03 strains exhibited

SUBMITTER: Hepp CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6261030 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature