Bocavirus

Surveillance and Genome Analysis of Human Bocavirus in Patients with Respiratory Infection in Guangzhou, China
Lin Xu1,2,3., Xia He1,2,3., Ding-mei Zhang1,2,3., Fa-shen Feng1,2,3, Zhu Wang1,2,3, Lin-lin Guan1,2,3, Jueheng Wu1,2,3, Rong Zhou4, Bo-jian Zheng3,5, Kwok-yung Yuen3,5, Meng-feng Li1,2,3, Kai-yuan Cao1,2,3*
1 Department of Microbiology, Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-senUniversity, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China, 2 Key Laboratory of Tropical Disease Control, Ministry of Education, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China, 3 Sun Yat-sen University – University of Hong Kong Joint Laboratory of Infectious Disease Surveillance, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China, 4 State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Diseases, GuangzhouMedical University, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China, 5 Department of Microbiology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Abstract
Human bocavirus (HBoV) is a novel parvovirus associated with respiratory tract diseases and gastrointestinal illness in adult and pediatric patients throughout the world. To investigate the epidemiological and genetic variation of HBoV in Guangzhou,South China, we screened 3460 throat swab samples from 1686 children and 1774 adults with acute respiratory infection symptoms for HBoV between March 2010 and February 2011, and analyzed the complete genome sequence of 2 HBoV strains. Specimens were screened for HBoV by real-time PCR and other 6 common respiratory viruses by RT-PCR or PCR. HBoV was detected in 58 (1.68%) out of 3460 samples, mostlyfrom pediatric patients (52/58) and inpatient children (47/58). Six adult patients were detected as HBoV positive and 5 were emergency cases. Of these HBoV positive cases, 19 (32.76%) had co-pathogens including influenza virus (n = 5), RSV (n = 5), parainfluenza (n = 4), adenovirus (n = 1), coronavirus (n = 7). The complete genome sequences of 2 HBoVs strains (Genbank no. JN794565 and JN794566)were analyzed. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the 2 HBoV strains were HBoV1, and were most genetically close to ST2 (GenBank accession number DQ0000496). Recombination analysis confirmed that HBoV strain GZ9081 was an intra–genotype recombinant strain among HBoV1 variants.
Citation: Xu L, He X, Zhang D-m, Feng F-s, Wang Z, et al. (2012) Surveillance and Genome Analysis of Human Bocavirus inPatients with Respiratory Infection in Guangzhou, China. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44876. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044876 Editor: Dhanasekaran Vijaykrishna, Duke-NUS Gradute Medical School, Singapore Received March 18, 2012; Accepted August 9, 2012; Published September 11, 2012 Copyright: ß 2012 Xu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported by National Major Projects of Major Infectious Disease Control and Prevention, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (grant numbers 2009ZX10004-213 and 2012ZX10004213-001). The funders had no rolein study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: caoky@mail.sysu.edu.cn . These authors contributed equally to this work.

Introduction
Human bocavirus (HBoV), recently identified as a new member of the Parvoviridae family from the respiratorysecretions of children suffering from lower respiratory tract infection [1], has a single-stranded DNA genome of ,5.2kb, which contains three open reading frames (ORFs), encoding two non-structural proteins (NS1 and NP1) and two viral capsid proteins (VPs) [2]. The nucleotide sequences are highly conserved among HBoVs circulating in different geographic regions [3], with the VP1/ VP2 gene displaying...