Title Surveillance and Genome Analysis of Human Bocavirus inPatients with Respiratory Infection in Guangzhou , China

Human bocavirus (HBoV) is a novel parvovirus associated with respiratory tract diseases and gastrointestinal illness in adult and pediatric patients throughout the world. To investigate the epidemiological and genetic variation of HBoV in Guangzhou, South China, we screened 3460 throat swab samples from 1686 children and 1774 adults with acute respiratory infection symptoms for HBoV between March 2010 and February 2011, and analyzed the complete genome sequence of 2 HBoV strains. Specimens were screened for HBoV by real-time PCR and other 6 common respiratory viruses by RT-PCR or PCR. HBoV was detected in 58 (1.68%) out of 3460 samples, mostly from pediatric patients (52/58) and inpatient children (47/58). Six adult patients were detected as HBoV positive and 5 were emergency cases. Of these HBoV positive cases, 19 (32.76%) had co-pathogens including influenza virus (n = 5), RSV (n = 5), parainfluenza (n = 4), adenovirus (n = 1), coronavirus (n = 7). The complete genome sequences of 2 HBoVs strains (Genbank no. JN794565 and JN794566) were analyzed. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the 2 HBoV strains were HBoV1, and were most genetically close to ST2 (GenBank accession number DQ0000496). Recombination analysis confirmed that HBoV strain GZ9081 was an intra–genotype recombinant strain among HBoV1 variants. Citation: Xu L, He X, Zhang D-m, Feng F-s, Wang Z, et al. (2012) Surveillance and Genome Analysis of Human Bocavirus in Patients with Respiratory Infection in Guangzhou, China. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44876. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044876 Editor: Dhanasekaran Vijaykrishna, Duke-NUS Gradute Medical School, Singapore Received March 18, 2012; Accepted August 9, 2012; Published September 11, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Xu et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was supported by National Major Projects of Major Infectious Disease Control and Prevention, the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (grant numbers 2009ZX10004-213 and 2012ZX10004213-001). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: caoky@mail.sysu.edu.cn . These authors contributed equally to this work.