Narrow Results

In 1998, the enterovirus (EV) infections outbreak in Taiwan caused 78 fatalities. Since then, EV infections have continuously posed a threat to the public. Among the 64 serotypes of enteroviruses known to infect human, the enterovirus 71(EV71) is suspected to be the major cause for severe cases. In this study, we estimate the recombination point of enterovirus 71 vp1 by using the method of Likelihood Analysis of Recombination in DNA. The datasets of enterovirus 71 DNA sequences are available in GenBank. After careful cross validation, eight candidate sequences are chosen to advance analysis, including 2734TAI98, TW227298, 1423SIN98 and other five DNA sequences as well. Then, the construction of the phylogeny trees (neighbor-joining trees will be used in this paper) would support for recombination in EV71 virus. In these two methods, the breakpoint was found to be in similar position, demonstrating that a single recombination event occurred prior to the divergence of these two strains.