Andernach Iris E, Hunewald Oliver E, Muller Claude P
Institute of Immunology, Centre de Recherche Public de la Santé/Laboratoire National de Santé, Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
PLoS One. 2013 Nov 29;8(11):e81690. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081690. eCollection 2013.
Despite its wide spread and high prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa, hepatitis B virus genotype E (HBV/E) has a surprisingly low genetic diversity, indicating an only recent emergence of this genotype in the general African population. Here, we performed extensive phylogeographic analyses, including Bayesian MCMC modeling. Our results indicate a mutation rate of 1.9 × 10(-4) substitutions per site and year (s/s/y) and confirm a recent emergence of HBV/E, most likely within the last 130 years, and only after the transatlantic slave-trade had come to an end. Our analyses suggest that HBV/E originated from the area of Nigeria, before rapidly spreading throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Interestingly, viral strains found in Haiti seem to be the result of multiple introductions only in the second half of the 20th century, corroborating an absence of a significant number of HBV/E strains in West Africa several centuries ago. Our results confirm that the hyperendemicity of HBV(E) in today's Africa is a recent phenomenon and likely the result of dramatic changes in the routes of viral transmission in a relatively recent past.
尽管乙型肝炎病毒E基因型（HBV/E）在撒哈拉以南非洲广泛传播且流行率很高，但其遗传多样性却出奇地低，这表明该基因型在非洲普通人群中是最近才出现的。在此，我们进行了广泛的系统地理学分析，包括贝叶斯MCMC建模。我们的结果表明，每个位点每年的突变率为1.9×10^(-4)替换（s/s/y），并证实HBV/E是最近才出现的，最有可能是在过去130年内，且是在跨大西洋奴隶贸易结束之后。我们的分析表明，HBV/E起源于尼日利亚地区，随后迅速在撒哈拉以南非洲传播。有趣的是，在海地发现的病毒株似乎是仅在20世纪下半叶多次引入的结果，这证实了几个世纪前西非不存在大量HBV/E毒株。我们的结果证实，如今非洲HBV（E）的高度流行是一个近期现象，很可能是过去相对较近时期病毒传播途径发生巨大变化的结果。
