Autochthonous Ratborne Seoul Virus Infection in Woman with Acute Kidney Injury

Abstract

Outside Asia, Seoul virus (SEOV) is an underestimated pathogen. In Germany, autochthonous SEOV-associated hantavirus disease has not been unequivocally diagnosed. We found clinical and molecular evidence for SEOV infection in a young woman; her pet rat was the source of infection.

Keywords: Germany; Seoul virus; hantavirus; hantavirus pulmonary syndrome; rats; renal failure; respiratory distress; viruses; zoonoses.

Figure

Molecular phylogenetic analysis of the amplified large (L) and small (S) segment regions of human and rat origin from Nordhorn/Germany (strains Nordhorn GER Hu and Nordhorn GER Rn, designated in bold). The consensus tree is based on a 412-nt region of the L segment (A) and a 673-nt region of the S segment (B). Alignments were constructed with Bioedit software package version7.2.5) (https://bioedit.software.informer.com) using the Clustal W Multiple Alignment algorithm. The best fitting substitution model was determined with jModeltest version 2.1.10 (https://github.com/ddarriba/jmodeltest2). Trees were reconstructed with MrBayes version 3.2.6 (http://www.mrbayes.net) and FasttreeMP version 2.1.10 (http://microbesonline.org/fasttree) executed on the CIPRES portal (https://www.phylo.org) according to maximum-likelihood and Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithms. The consensus tree is based on Bayesian analyses with 2 × 10⁶ generations, a burn-in phase of 25%, and the Hasegawa-Kishono-Yano substitution model with gamma distribution. Bootstrap values were transferred to the Bayesian tree behind posterior probabilities only if they were >50% and if branches of both trees were consistent. Hantaan virus was used as outgroup. The L and S segment sequences were deposited in GenBank under accession nos. MT123530–33. At the end of the strain names the country of origin is given: BEL, Belgium; CHN, China; FRA, France; GBR, Great Britain; GER, Germany; INA, Indonesia; KOR, South Korea; NED, the Netherlands; USA, United States. Scale bars indicate nucleotide substitutions per site.