title: The complete genome of klassevirus - a novel picornavirus in pediatric stool.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Diarrhea kills 2 million children worldwide each year, yet an etiological agent is not found in approximately 30-50% of cases. Picornaviral genera such as enterovirus, kobuvirus, cosavirus, parechovirus, hepatovirus, teschovirus, and cardiovirus have all been found in human and animal diarrhea. Modern technologies, especially deep sequencing, allow rapid, high-throughput screening of clinical samples such as stool for new infectious agents associated with human disease.
  
  
  RESULTS
  A pool of 141 pediatric gastroenteritis samples that were previously found to be negative for known diarrheal viruses was subjected to pyrosequencing. From a total of 937,935 sequence reads, a collection of 849 reads distantly related to Aichi virus were assembled and found to comprise 75% of a novel picornavirus genome. The complete genome was subsequently cloned and found to share 52.3% nucleotide pairwise identity and 38.9% amino acid identity to Aichi virus. The low level of sequence identity suggests a novel picornavirus genus which we have designated klassevirus. Blinded screening of 751 stool specimens from both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals revealed a second positive case of klassevirus infection, which was subsequently found to be from the index case's 11-month old twin.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We report the discovery of human klassevirus 1, a member of a novel picornavirus genus, in stool from two infants from Northern California. Further characterization and epidemiological studies will be required to establish whether klasseviruses are significant causes of human infection.
authors.affiliation: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Departments of Medicine, Biochemistry, and Microbiology, University of California, San Francisco, California 94143, USA. gerbix@gmail.com
authors.forename: Alexander L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Greninger
authors.forename: Charles
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Runckel
authors.forename: Charles Y
authors.initials: CY
authors.lastname: Chiu
authors.forename: Thomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Haggerty
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Parsonnet
authors.forename: Donald
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ganem
authors.forename: Joseph L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: DeRisi
mesh_terms: D002140:California; D005243:Feces / Q000821:virology*; D005759:Gastroenteritis / Q000821:virology*; D016679:Genome, Viral; D006801:Humans; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010849:Picornaviridae / Q000235:genetics* / Q000302:isolation & purification*; D010850:Picornaviridae Infections / Q000821:virology*; D012367:RNA, Viral / Q000235:genetics*; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D017386:Sequence Homology, Amino Acid; D012689:Sequence Homology, Nucleic Acid
chemical_list: D012367:RNA, Viral