Molecular epidemiology of rhinovirus among hospitalised patients, Singapore

Abstract

Human rhinovirus (HRV) is the most prevalent respiratory etiological agent in the world. Over 100 genotypes have been characterised using molecular genotyping techniques. Here, we characterised the molecular epidemiology of the circulating rhinoviruses among hospitalised patients in Singapore by sequencing 134 rhinovirus-positive respiratory specimens that were collected in the period between 2013 and 2015. Each sequence was assigned a genogroup and a genotype using the Enterovirus Genotyping Tool Version 0.1 and phylogenetic reconstruction, respectively. In this study, HRV-A (n=88) and HRV-C (n=38) were identified as the dominant genogroups in Singapore. HRV-A28 (n=7) was the dominant genotype in HRV-A while both HRVC2 (n=8) and HRV-C11 (n=8) were the dominant genotypes in HRV-C. HRV-B was observed to have the lowest number of positive detections in our study population (n=8). The result is interesting as another group had previously found HRV-B to be the second most common genogroup in Singapore after HRV-A.