Dabrowski Piotr Wojtek, Radonić Aleksandar, Kurth Andreas, Nitsche Andreas
Centre for Biological Threats and Special Pathogens, Robert Koch Institute, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2013 Dec 3;8(12):e79953. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0079953. eCollection 2013.
Zoonotic infections caused by several orthopoxviruses (OPV) like monkeypox virus or vaccinia virus have a significant impact on human health. In Europe, the number of diagnosed infections with cowpox viruses (CPXV) is increasing in animals as well as in humans. CPXV used to be enzootic in cattle; however, such infections were not being diagnosed over the last decades. Instead, individual cases of cowpox are being found in cats or exotic zoo animals that transmit the infection to humans. Both animals and humans reveal local exanthema on arms and legs or on the face. Although cowpox is generally regarded as a self-limiting disease, immunosuppressed patients can develop a lethal systemic disease resembling smallpox. To date, only limited information on the complex and, compared to other OPV, sparsely conserved CPXV genomes is available. Since CPXV displays the widest host range of all OPV known, it seems important to comprehend the genetic repertoire of CPXV which in turn may help elucidate specific mechanisms of CPXV pathogenesis and origin. Therefore, 22 genomes of independent CPXV strains from clinical cases, involving ten humans, four rats, two cats, two jaguarundis, one beaver, one elephant, one marah and one mongoose, were sequenced by using massive parallel pyrosequencing. The extensive phylogenetic analysis showed that the CPXV strains sequenced clearly cluster into several distinct clades, some of which are closely related to Vaccinia viruses while others represent different clades in a CPXV cluster. Particularly one CPXV clade is more closely related to Camelpox virus, Taterapox virus and Variola virus than to any other known OPV. These results support and extend recent data from other groups who postulate that CPXV does not form a monophyletic clade and should be divided into multiple lineages.
由几种正痘病毒（OPV）如猴痘病毒或痘苗病毒引起的人畜共患感染对人类健康有重大影响。在欧洲，牛痘病毒（CPXV）在动物和人类中的确诊感染数量都在增加。CPXV过去在牛群中呈地方流行性；然而，在过去几十年中并未诊断出此类感染。相反，在猫或外来动物园动物中发现了个别牛痘病例，并将感染传播给人类。动物和人类的手臂、腿部或面部都会出现局部皮疹。虽然牛痘通常被认为是一种自限性疾病，但免疫抑制患者可能会发展成类似天花的致命全身性疾病。迄今为止，关于复杂且与其他OPV相比保守性较差的CPXV基因组的信息有限。由于CPXV显示出已知所有OPV中最广泛的宿主范围，了解CPXV的基因库似乎很重要，这反过来可能有助于阐明CPXV发病机制和起源的具体机制。因此，通过使用大规模平行焦磷酸测序技术，对来自临床病例的22个独立CPXV菌株的基因组进行了测序，这些病例涉及10名人类、4只大鼠、2只猫、2只美洲豹猫、1只海狸、1只大象、1只长鼻袋鼠和1只猫鼬。广泛的系统发育分析表明，测序的CPXV菌株明显聚类成几个不同的进化枝，其中一些与痘苗病毒密切相关，而其他一些则代表CPXV聚类中的不同进化枝。特别是一个CPXV进化枝与骆驼痘病毒、沙鼠痘病毒和天花病毒的关系比与任何其他已知OPV的关系更密切。这些结果支持并扩展了其他研究小组最近的数据，这些数据推测CPXV不会形成单系进化枝，应该分为多个谱系。
