Title:	Norovirus phyloscanner
DNr:	NAISS 2023/22-591
Project Type:	NAISS Small Compute
Principal Investigator:	Gustaf Rydell <gustaf.rydell@gu.se>
Affiliation:	Göteborgs universitet
Duration:	2023-06-01 – 2023-09-20
Classification:	30109
Keywords:

Abstract

Norovirus (NoV) is the causative agent of the winter vomiting disease and the leading cause of outbreaks of gastroenteritis in all age groups [1]. Outbreaks of the virus are difficult to control, especially in closed settings. Due to this, norovirus is the leading microbial cause of closure of hospital wards and entails large costs for the society. A large problem for epidemiology studies has been the difficulty to distinguish between closely related virus strains making it hard to determine whether different cases and outbreaks are connected. We have developed a method for Ion Torrent sequencing of 1500 nt of the norovirus capsid protein gene. Our result showed that there was a large quasi species variation, which made the phylogenetic analysis complicated. We have started to use a software that allows phylogenetic trees to be constructed from Ion torrent reads. It was possible to performa an analysis with data from three patients, but our computer could not handle more patients. We think that the preliminary results are very interesting and we would like to use this method to analyze around 100 samples from a norovirus hospital outbreak.