A novel norovirus GII.17 lineage contributed to adult gastroenteritis in Shanghai, China, during the winter of 2014–2015

Abstract

Norovirus (NoV) is now recognized as a leading cause of nonbacterial acute gastroenteritis; however, the NoV GII.17 genotype has rarely been reported as the predominant genotype in clinical diarrhea cases. During the winter of 2014–2015, the GII.17 genotype, together with the NoV GII.4 genotype, dominated in sporadic adult patients with gastroenteritis in Shanghai. Phylogenetic analysis based on full-length VP1 amino acid sequences showed that the GII.17 strains that emerged in Shanghai have close evolutionary relationships with strains recently collected in the Hong Kong area, Guangdong province of China, and Japan during the same period. This cluster in the phylogenetic tree may represent a novel NoV GII.17 lineage recently circulating in East Asia. Pairwise distances between clusters also revealed the evolution of the NoV GII.17 genotype in previous decades. Our study emphasizes the importance of combined surveillance of NoV-associated infections.

Keywords:

• gastroenteritis
• genotypes
• norovirus

This work was supported by the Shanghai Health Bureau Project (20124467 and 20134151), the Shanghai City Science and Technology Commission (134119a9000), the National Natural Science Funds of China (81341004, 31200108 and 81470829), and the National Megaprojects of China for Infectious Disease (2014ZX10004002-003-004 and 2012ZX10004-211).

Supplementary information of this article can be found on the Emerging Microbes and Infections's website: http://www.nature.com/emi.