Complete genome sequence of a highly divergent astrovirus isolated from a child with acute diarrhea.docVIP

Virology Journal BioMedCentral Research Open Access Complete genome sequence of a highly divergent astrovirus isolated from a child with acute diarrhea Stacy R Finkbeiner1, Carl D Kirkwood2 and David Wang*1 Address: 1Departments of Molecular Microbiology and Pathology Immunology, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA and 2Enteric Virus Research Group, Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Royal Childrens Hospital, Victoria, Australia Email: Stacy R Finkbeiner - srfinkbe@; Carl D Kirkwood - carl.kirkwood@.au; David Wang* - davewang@ * Corresponding author Published: 14 October 2008 Received: 22 July 2008 Accepted: 14 October 2008 Virology Journal 2008, 5:117 doi:10.1186/1743-422X-5-117 This article is available from: /content/5/1/117 ? 2008 Finkbeiner et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: Astroviruses infect a variety of mammals and birds and are causative agents of diarrhea in humans and other animal hosts. We have previously described the identification of several sequence fragments with limited sequence identity to known astroviruses in a stool specimen obtained from a child with acute diarrhea, suggesting that a novel virus was present. Results: In this study, the complete genome of this novel virus isolate was sequenced and analyzed. The overall genome organization of this virus paralleled that of known astroviruses, with 3 open reading frames identified. Phylogenetic analysis of the ORFs indicated that this virus is highly divergent from all previously described animal and human astroviruses. Molecular features that are highly conserved in human serotypes 1–8, such as a 3NTR stem-loop structure and conserve