Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-1-2021
Publication Title
Viruses
Volume
13
Issue
6
Pages
1-6
Publisher Name
MDPI
Abstract
Polyomaviruses are abundant in the human body. The polyomaviruses JC virus (JCPyV) and BK virus (BKPyV) are common viruses in the human urinary tract. Prior studies have estimated that JCPyV infects between 20 and 80% of adults and that BKPyV infects between 65 and 90% of individuals by age 10. However, these two viruses encode for the same six genes and share 75% nucleotide sequence identity across their genomes. While prior urinary virome studies have repeatedly reported the presence of JCPyV, we were interested in seeing how JCPyV prevalence compares to BKPyV. We retrieved all publicly available shotgun metagenomic sequencing reads from urinary microbiome and virome studies (n = 165). While one third of the data sets produced hits to JCPyV, upon further investigation were we able to determine that the majority of these were in fact BKPyV. This distinction was made by specifically mining for JCPyV and BKPyV and considering uniform coverage across the genome. This approach provides confidence in taxon calls, even between closely related viruses with significant sequence similarity.
Identifier
85107437225 (Scopus)
Recommended Citation
Mormando, Rita; Wolfe, Alan J.; and Putonti, Catherine. Discriminating between jcpyv and bkpyv in urinary virome data sets. Viruses, 13, 6: 1-6, 2021. Retrieved from Loyola eCommons, Biology: Faculty Publications and Other Works, http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/v13061041
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
