Bigiş Elif Zülal, Yıldız Elif, Tagka Anna, Pavlopoulou Athanasia, Chrousos George P, Geronikolou Styliani
Izmir Biomedicine and Genome Center, 35340 Balçova, Izmir, Türkiye.
Izmir International Biomedicine and Genome Institute, Dokuz Eylül University, 35340 Balçova, Izmir, Türkiye.
Viruses. 2025 Apr 30;17(5):659. doi: 10.3390/v17050659.
Influenza is a communicable disease caused by RNA viruses. Strains A (affecting animals, humans), B (affecting humans), C (affecting rarely humans and pigs), and D (affecting cattle) comprise a variety of substrains each. Influenza A strain, affecting both humans and animals, is considered the most infectious, causing pandemics. There is an emerging need for the accurate classification of the different influenza A virus (IAV) subtypes, elucidating their mode of infection, as well as their fast and accurate diagnosis. Notably, in recent years, oligomeric sequences (words) that are present in the pathogen genomes and entirely absent from the host human genome were suggested to provide robust biomarkers for virus classification and rapid detection. To this end, we performed updated phylogenetic analyses of the IAV hemagglutinin genes, focusing on the sub H1N1 and H5N1. More importantly, we applied in silico methods to identify minimum length "words" that exist consistently in the IAV genomes and are entirely absent from the human genome; these sequences identified in our current analysis may represent minimal signatures that can be utilized to distinguish IAV from other influenza viruses, as well as to perform rapid diagnostic tests.
流感是一种由RNA病毒引起的传染病。甲型（感染动物、人类）、乙型（感染人类）、丙型（极少感染人类和猪）和丁型（感染牛）流感病毒各包含多种亚毒株。甲型流感病毒既感染人类也感染动物，被认为传染性最强，可引发大流行。准确分类不同的甲型流感病毒（IAV）亚型、阐明其感染方式以及进行快速准确诊断的需求日益凸显。值得注意的是，近年来，有人提出病原体基因组中存在而人类宿主基因组中完全不存在的寡聚序列（单词）可为病毒分类和快速检测提供可靠的生物标志物。为此，我们对IAV血凝素基因进行了更新的系统发育分析，重点关注H1N1和H5N1亚型。更重要的是，我们应用计算机方法来识别在IAV基因组中一致存在且在人类基因组中完全不存在的最短长度“单词”；我们当前分析中确定的这些序列可能代表可用于区分IAV与其他流感病毒以及进行快速诊断测试的最小特征。
