J Bacteriol Virol.  2009 Jun;39(2):125-136. 10.4167/jbv.2009.39.2.125.

Genetic Characteristics and Phylogenetic Analysis of Influenza Type B Viruses Isolated from Nasopharyngeal Suction Samples of Korean Patients

• Baek YH
• Song YJ
• Song MS
• Pascua PN
• Lee JH
• Han HS
• Woo SI
• Kim SY
• Choi YK

• KMID: 1474173
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.4167/jbv.2009.39.2.125

Abstract

To investigate the genetic characteristics of human influenza type B viruses circulating in Chungbuk province, Korea, we tested 510 clinical samples of nasopharyngeal suction from pediatric patients diagnosed with respiratory illness between June 2007 and June 2008. Twelve out of thirty-six isolates were identified as type B influenza virus by RT-PCR and sequencing analysis. Interestingly, genetic characterization of type B viruses isolated in this study revealed that all type B influenza viruses were the Yamagata lineages, a vaccine strains of southern hemisphere during 2007~2008, rather than the Victoria lineage of northern hemisphere during 2007~2008. Furthermore, there were a total of twelve unique mutations (HA: H40Y, D/G230S, V252M and K272R and NA: P3H, P/T/S42Q, N59S) occurred in our type B isolates. These results suggest that relative high prevalence of type B viruses in Korea during 2007~2008 season might be due to the wrong vaccine strains selection. Taken together, the results of this study demonstrate continuous evolutions of human type B viruses by antigenic drift and also highlight the need to closely monitoring of influenza viruses to aid the early detection of potentially pandemic strains as well as underscore the need for new therapeutics.

Keyword

Influenza B virus; Antigenic drift; Phylogenetic analysis; Vaccine strain

MeSH Terms

Herpesvirus 1, Cercopithecine
Humans
Influenza B virus
Influenza, Human
Korea
Orthomyxoviridae
Pandemics
Prevalence
Seasons
Suction
Victoria

Figure

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  Figure 1. Amplification of the eight viral gene segments of influenza B viruses isolated in this study. Full length segments were amplified by RT-PCR using different combination of primers for each gene (Table 1) and visualized by electrophoresis on 0.8% agarose gel. Two representative viruses (B/Cheongju/411/2008 and B/Cheongju/437/2008 with GenBank accession number FJ461674~FJ461689) are shown (PB2: 2396 bp; PB1: 2369 bp; PA: 2308 bp; HA: 1755 bp; NP: 1683 bp; NA: 1557 bp; M: 1076 bp; NS: 846 bp).

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  Figure 2. Phylogenetic analysis. Phylogenetic trees of the nucleotide sequences for the 8 viral Genes (A~H) including (A) HA and (B) NA genes in this study (in bold) compared with nucleotide sequences from selected human influenza B viruses available in GenBank including the three to five vaccine strains. The vaccine strains are indicated by stars. Phylograms were generated by neighbor-joining analysis with 1000 bootstrapped replicates. Bootstrap values for nodes occurring in 60% or more of multiple bootstrap replicates are given immediately to the left of the node.

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