Abstract
Rabies virus (RABV) and other lyssaviruses can cause rabies and rabies-like diseases, which are a persistent public health threat to humans and other mammals. Lyssaviruses exhibit distinct characteristics in terms of geographical distribution and host specificity, indicative of a long-standing diversification to adapt to the environment. However, the evolutionary diversity of lyssaviruses, in terms of codon usage, is still unclear. We found that RABV has the lowest codon usage bias among lyssaviruses strains, evidenced by its high mean effective number of codons (ENC) (53.84 ± 0.35). Moreover, natural selection is the driving force in shaping the codon usage pattern of these strains. In summary, our study sheds light on the codon usage patterns of lyssaviruses, which can aid in the development of control strategies and experimental research.
Highlights
Biologists are devoted to exploring the complexity of evolutionary interactions among divergent viruses and their underlying reservoirs, and apply latent theoretical tenets to resolve practical cases
Nucleotide composition constraints can influence the pattern of codon usage so we analyzed the composition of rabies virus (RABV) coding sequences
These results indicated that the coding sequences of lyssaviruses are AU-rich (Table S1)
Summary
Biologists are devoted to exploring the complexity of evolutionary interactions among divergent viruses and their underlying reservoirs, and apply latent theoretical tenets to resolve practical cases. Viruses from the genus Lyssavirus, usually called lyssaviruses, belonging to Rhabdoviridae of the Mononegavirales order, present a classical case to study the emergence and cross-species transmission of infectious disease [1]. RABV can infect a variety of mammalian hosts, especially bats and certain carnivores. It is distributed worldwide and has a high mortality, and remains a permanent threat to public health [4,5,6]; it is still neglected. RABV, Lagos bat virus (LBV), Mokola virus (MOKV), Duvenhage virus (DUVV), European bat lyssavirus 1 (EBLV-1), European bat lyssavirus 2 (EBLV-2) and Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV) are seven species that have been already identified. The evolutionary relationship among these different viruses, caused by geographical isolation, is still not clear
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