Abstract
: Influenza C contributes to economic damage caused by working days lost through absence or inefficiency and may occasionally cause an acute respiratory illness in a paediatric setting. All Influenza C sequences from the NCBI Influenza Virus Resource were examined to determine the date of the most recent common ancestor (t-MRCA), the average nucleotide substitution rate, and the location of residues under positive selection, for each of the seven genome segments of this virus. The segment with the deepest phylogeny was found to be segment 4, encoding the haemagglutinin-esterase protein (HE) with mean t-MRCA at 1890 of the common era (AD), at a 95% highest posterior density (HPD) of 1857-1924 AD. Other genome segments have slightly more recent common ancestors, ranging from mean t-MRCAs of 1916 AD (HPD 1891-1937) for segment 7, encoding the two non-structural proteins (NS) to 1944 AD (HPD 1940-1948) for segment 2 encoding the type 1 basic polymerase (PB1). On the basis of the Bayesian analysis a reclassification of lineages within genome segments is proposed. Some evidence for positive selection was found in the receptor-binding domain of the haemagglutinin-esterase protein. However, average ω (omega) values ranged from 0.05 for polymerase basic protein 2 (PB2) to 0.38 for non-structural protein 2 (NS2), suggesting that strong to moderate purifying selection is the main trend. Characteristic combinations of segment lineages were identified (genome constellations) and shown to have a relatively short life-span before being broken up by reassortment.
Highlights
Influenza C virus causes a sore throat, coryza, headache and malaise
Stochastic birth and death of lineages would occur, and older clades would be the most diverse in terms of number of strains and their average sequence diversity. This is the case for Influenza C, where the correlation coefficient between size of an individual lineage within a segment and the the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) of that lineage is 0.53, and that between total segment sequence variability (Pi) and the segment’s the most recent common ancestor (t-MRCA) is 0.74
Less than a twofold difference is found in mean nucleotide substitution rates across the different genome segments of Influenza C
Summary
Influenza C virus (genus Influenzavirus C; family Orthomyxoviridae) causes a sore throat, coryza, headache and malaise. Not constituting a pandemic threat, and not included in the seasonal influenza vaccine, Influenza C can cause acute respiratory illness in a paediatric setting [3][4][5], especially in those less than 2 years old [2]. Influenza C contributes to economic damage caused by working days lost through absence and decreased efficiency of the workforce during its relatively long period of presentation of symptoms [7]. Half of inoculated volunteers develop symptoms, despite a high level of population seropositivity [1]. This suggests that Influenza C, like the other influenza viruses, is able to evade the host immune system via antigenic variation. Knowledge of its patterns of molecular evolution is of importance to any future attempt to contain the disease or vaccinate against it
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