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. 2012 Aug;18(8):1274-81.
doi: 10.3201/eid1808.120057.

Hepatitis E virus strains in rabbits and evidence of a closely related strain in humans, France

Jacques Izopet  1 , Martine Dubois, Stéphane Bertagnoli, Sébastien Lhomme, Stéphane Marchandeau, Samuel Boucher, Nassim Kamar, Florence Abravanel, Jean-Luc Guérin
Affiliations

Hepatitis E virus strains in rabbits and evidence of a closely related strain in humans, France

Jacques Izopet et al. Emerg Infect Dis. 2012 Aug.

Abstract

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) strains from rabbits indicate that these mammals may be a reservoir for HEVs that cause infection in humans. To determine HEV prevalence in rabbits and the strains' genetic characteristics, we tested bile, liver, and additional samples from farmed and wild rabbits in France. We detected HEV RNA in 7% (14/200) of bile samples from farmed rabbits (in 2009) and in 23% (47/205) of liver samples from wild rabbits (in 2007-2010). Full-length genomic sequences indicated that all rabbit strains belonged to the same clade (nucleotide sequences 72.2%-78.2% identical to HEV genotypes 1-4). Comparison with HEV sequences of human strains and reference sequences identified a human strain closely related to rabbit strain HEV. We found a 93-nt insertion in the X domain of open reading frame 1 of the human strain and all rabbit HEV strains. These findings indicate that the host range of HEV in Europe is expanding and that zoonotic transmission of HEV from rabbits is possible.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Phylogenetic tree for the 189-bp sequence of open reading frame 2 of the capsid gene of rabbit hepatitis E virus (HEV) strains (circles), human strains circulating in France (triangles), and reference strains (diamonds). GenBank accession numbers are shown for each HEV strain used in the phylogenetic analysis. Scale bar indicates nucleotide substitutions per site.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Phylogenetic tree based on full-length sequences of hepatitis E virus (HEV) rabbit strains (circles), the human strain TLS-18516 (triangles) and reference strains (diamonds). GenBank accession numbers are shown for each HEV strain used in the phylogenetic analysis. Scale bar indicates nucleotide substitutions per site.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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