Center for Systems Biology, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
Kenema Government Hospital, Kenema, Sierra Leone.
Science. 2014 Sep 12;345(6202):1369-72. doi: 10.1126/science.1259657. Epub 2014 Aug 28.
In its largest outbreak, Ebola virus disease is spreading through Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. We sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes from 78 patients in Sierra Leone to ~2000× coverage. We observed a rapid accumulation of interhost and intrahost genetic variation, allowing us to characterize patterns of viral transmission over the initial weeks of the epidemic. This West African variant likely diverged from central African lineages around 2004, crossed from Guinea to Sierra Leone in May 2014, and has exhibited sustained human-to-human transmission subsequently, with no evidence of additional zoonotic sources. Because many of the mutations alter protein sequences and other biologically meaningful targets, they should be monitored for impact on diagnostics, vaccines, and therapies critical to outbreak response.
在最大规模的爆发中，埃博拉病毒病正在几内亚、利比里亚、塞拉利昂和尼日利亚传播。我们对来自塞拉利昂的 78 名患者的 99 个埃博拉病毒基因组进行了测序，覆盖度约为 2000 倍。我们观察到宿主间和宿主内遗传变异的快速积累，使我们能够在疫情的最初几周内对病毒传播模式进行特征描述。这种西非变体可能是在 2004 年左右从中非谱系中分化出来的，于 2014 年 5 月从几内亚传播到塞拉利昂，此后一直表现出持续的人际传播，没有证据表明存在其他动物源性来源。由于许多突变改变了蛋白质序列和其他有生物学意义的靶标，因此应该监测这些突变对诊断、疫苗和治疗的影响，这些对于疫情应对至关重要。
