Title

Phylogenetic analysis of H1N1 sequences from pandemic infections during 2009 in India

Authors

Guntupally Balaswamy Arti Flavia & Kalimuthusamy Natarajaseenivasan*

Affiliation

Division of Medical Microbiology, Department of Microbiology, School of Life Sciences, Bharathidasan University, Tiruchirappalli-620 024, Tamilnadu, India

Email

natarajaseenivasan@rediffmail.com; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received July 26, 2010; Accepted August 26, 2010; Published February 15, 2011

Since April 2009, a serious pandemic infection has been rapidly spread across the world. These infections are caused due to the novel swine origin influenza A (H1N1) virus and hence these are commonly called as Swine Flu. This new virus is the reassortment of avian, human and swine influenza viruses and thus it has a unique genome composition. There are 16 different types of hemagglutinin (HA) and 9 different types of neuraminidase (NA) that can be genetically and antigenetically differentiated. The first influenza A virus isolated from pigs was of the H1N1 subtype and these viruses have been reported to cause infection in pigs in many countries. The outbreak of this virus has been transmitted from pigs to humans. This new reassorted (exchange of genes) virus which is the cause of 2009 pandemic infections has the ability to spread from human to human. This spread of infection should be brought to an end. In this study, a phylogenetic analysis of the nucleotide sequences of the RNA segments of human H1N1 viruses was carried using MEGA version 4.0 to demonstrate the route map of infection to India. Phylogenetic analysis of the sequences from India, published in Influenza Virus Resource (a database that integrates information gathered from the Influenza Genome Sequencing Project of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID) and the genbank of the (NCBI)) was retrieved and used for the analysis. The results showed that the various segments of the Indian isolates clustered well with the sequences from American, Asian and European countries and thus indicating the transmission of viruses from these places to India.  

Citation

Flavia & Natarajaseenivasan, Bioinformation 5(10): 416-421 (2011)

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.