Research Group on Computational Biology and Microbial Ecology, Department of Biological Sciences, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.
Max Planck Tandem Group in Computational Biology, Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia.
Sci Rep. 2019 Aug 5;9(1):11342. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-47742-z.
The order Herpesvirales encompasses a wide variety of important and broadly distributed human pathogens. During the last decades, similarities in the viral cycle and the structure of some of their proteins with those of the order Caudovirales, the tailed bacterial viruses, have brought speculation regarding the existence of an evolutionary relationship between these clades. To evaluate such hypothesis, we used over 600 Herpesvirales and 2000 Caudovirales complete genomes to search for the presence or absence of clusters of orthologous protein domains and constructed a dendrogram based on their compositional similarities. The results obtained strongly suggest an evolutionary relationship between the two orders. Furthermore, they allowed to propose a core genome for the Herpesvirales, composed of 4 proteins, including the ATPase subunit of the DNA-packaging terminase, the only protein with previously verified conservation. Accordingly, a phylogenetic tree constructed with sequences derived from the clusters associated to these proteins grouped the Herpesvirales strains accordingly to the established families and subfamilies. Overall, this work provides results supporting the hypothesis that the two orders are evolutionarily related and contributes to the understanding of the history of the Herpesvirales.
疱疹病毒目包含了各种各样重要的、广泛分布的人类病原体。在过去的几十年里，它们的病毒周期和一些蛋白质结构与尾状细菌病毒目（即有尾噬菌体目）的相似性，引发了关于这两个进化枝之间是否存在进化关系的推测。为了评估这一假设，我们使用了超过 600 种疱疹病毒目和 2000 种有尾噬菌体目的完整基因组，以搜索同源蛋白结构域簇的存在或缺失情况，并基于它们的组成相似性构建了一个系统发育树。所得结果强烈表明这两个目之间存在进化关系。此外，它们还允许提出疱疹病毒目的核心基因组，由 4 种蛋白质组成，包括 DNA 包装末端酶的 ATP 酶亚基，这是唯一一种具有先前验证的保守性的蛋白质。相应地，使用与这些蛋白质相关的簇中获得的序列构建的系统发育树将疱疹病毒株按照已建立的科和亚科进行了分组。总的来说，这项工作提供了支持这两个目在进化上是相关的假设的结果，并有助于理解疱疹病毒目的历史。
