Bioinformatic approaches to draft the viral genome sequence of Canary Islands cases related to the multicountry mpox virus 2022-outbreak.
Autor
Valenzuela Fernández, Agustín; Muñoz Barrera, Adrián; Ciuffreda, Laura; Alcoba Florez, Julia; Rubio Rodríguez, Luis A.; Rodríguez Pérez, Héctor; Gil Campesino, Helena; García Martínez de Artola, Diego; Salas Hernández, Josmar; Rodríguez Núñez, Julia; Íñigo Campos , Antonio; García Olivares, Víctor; Díez Gil, Oscar; González Montelongo, Rafaela; Lorenzo Salazar, José M.; Flores, CarlosFecha
2023Resumen
On July 23, 2022, monkeypox disease (mpox) was declared a Public Emergency of International Concern
(PHEIC) by the World Health Organization (WHO) due to a multicountry outbreak. In Europe, several cases
of mpox virus (MPXV) infection related to this outbreak were detected in the Canary Islands (Spain). Here
we describe the combination of viral DNA sequencing and bioinformatic approaches, including methods for
de novo genome assembly and short- and long-read technologies, used to reconstruct the first MPXV
genome isolated in the Canary Islands on the 31st of May 2022 from a male adult patient with mild
symptoms. The same sequencing and bioinformatic approaches were then validated with three other positive cases of MPXV infection from the same mpox outbreak. We obtained the best results using a reference-based approach with short reads, evidencing 46–79 nucleotide variants against viral sequences
from the 2018–2019 mpox outbreak and placing the viral sequences in the new B.1 sublineage of clade IIb of
the MPXV classification. This study of MPXV demonstrates the potential of metagenomics sequencing for
rapid and precise pathogen identification.