Continued persistence of ECSA genotype with replacement of K211E in E1 gene of Chikungunya virus in Delhi from 2010 to 2014

Publication date: July 2016 Source:Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Disease, Volume 6, Issue 7 Author(s): Priyanka Singh, Pankaj Sharma, Sachin Kumar, Mala Chhabra, Moshahid Alam Rizvi, Veena Mittal, Dipesh Bhattacharya, Srinivas Venkatesh, Arvind Rai Chikungunya is a viral disease caused by arthropod-borne Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) and transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. In 2006, CHIKV re-emerged in Indian Ocean islands, Southeast Asia and India. Delhi witnessed the continued occurrence of CHIKV after its first outbreak in 2010. The constant monitoring of the circulating strains of CHIKV is important for designing and executing control strategies. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to unveil the genomic changes of CHIKV in Delhi during the period 2010–2014. RT-PCR of nsP1 and E1 gene region of CHIKV was performed for diagnosis and mutational study, respectively. Positive CHIKV samples were processed for the nucleotide sequence of E1 gene region. Nucleotide alignments of study sequences revealed both synonymous and non-synonymous mutations, although amino acid alignments of all study sequences had single amino acid replacement lysine (K) by glutamic acid (E) at position 211 in E1 gene. A phylogenetic analysis revealed that all the study sequences clustered in East, Central and South African genotype of CHIKV. The same strain of East, Central and South African genotype is circulating in this region during the period 2010–2014.
Source: Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Disease - Category: Tropical Medicine Source Type: research