Comparative study of the nucleotide bias between the novel H1N1 and H5N1 subtypes of influenza A viruses using bioinformatics techniques

Abstract

Novel influenza A (H1N1) is a newly emerged flu virus which was first detected in April, 2009. Unlike the avian influenza (H5N1), this virus has been known to be able to spread from human to human directly. Although it is uncertain that how severe this novel H1N1 virus will be in terms of human illness, illness may be more widespread because most people will not have immunity to it. In this study, we compared the codon usage bias between the novel H1N1 influenza A viruses and other viruses such as H1N1 and H5N1 subtypes to investigate the genomic patterns of novel influenza A (H1N1). Totally 1,675 nucleotide sequences of the hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) genes of influenza A virus including H1N1 and H5N1 subtypes occurred from 2004 to 2009 were used. As a result, we found that the novel H1N1 influenza A viruses showed the most close correlations with the swine-origin H1N1 subtypes than other H1N1 viruses in the result from not only the analysis of nucleotide compositions, but also the phylogenetic analysis. Although the genetic sequences of novel H1N1 subtypes were not exactly same as the other H1N1 subtypes, the HA and NA genes of novel H1N1s showed very similar codon usage patterns with other H1N1 subtypes, especially with the swine-origin H1N1 influenza A viruses. Our findings strongly suggested that those novel H1N1 viruses seemed to be originated from the swine-host H1N1 viruses in terms of the codon usage patterns.