Memorias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz (Jul 2014)

Inferences about the global scenario of human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 infection using data mining of viral sequences

  • Thessika Hialla Almeida Araujo,
  • Fernanda Khouri Barreto,
  • Alcântara Luiz Carlos Júnior,
  • Aline Cristina Andrade Mota Miranda

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1590/0074-0276130587
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 109, no. 4
pp. 448 – 451

Abstract

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Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) is mainly associated with two diseases: tropical spastic paraparesis/HTLV-1-associated myelopathy (TSP/HAM) and adult T-cell leukaemia/lymphoma. This retrovirus infects five-10 million individuals throughout the world. Previously, we developed a database that annotates sequence data from GenBank and the present study aimed to describe the clinical, molecular and epidemiological scenarios of HTLV-1 infection through the stored sequences in this database. A total of 2,545 registered complete and partial sequences of HTLV-1 were collected and 1,967 (77.3%) of those sequences represented unique isolates. Among these isolates, 93% contained geographic origin information and only 39% were related to any clinical status. A total of 1,091 sequences contained information about the geographic origin and viral subtype and 93% of these sequences were identified as subtype “a”. Ethnicity data are very scarce. Regarding clinical status data, 29% of the sequences were generated from TSP/HAM and 67.8% from healthy carrier individuals. Although the data mining enabled some inferences about specific aspects of HTLV-1 infection to be made, due to the relative scarcity of data of available sequences, it was not possible to delineate a global scenario of HTLV-1 infection.

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