* Center for Information Biology and DNA Data Bank of Japan, National Institute of Genetics, Research Organization of Information and Systems, Mishima, Japan; Chiba Prefectural Livestock Experiment Center, Yachimata, Japan; and
Chiba Prefectural Chyou Livestock Hygiene Service Center, Sakura, Japan
Correspondence: E-mail: tgojobor{at}genes.nig.ac.jp.
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Abstract |
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Key Words: PRRSV evolutionary rate divergence time positive selection emerging virus and transmembrane region
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Introduction |
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Interestingly, when the genomic sequences of these reference sequences were determined, it was found that the amino acid identity between these two types is less than 60% (Wensvoort et al. 1992; Murtaugh et al. 1998). It follows that PRRSV diverged into two types varying by 40% of the amino acids within about 10 years and that PRRSV have evolved at a high evolutionary rate (order of 102/site/year) compared with those (orders of 103 to 105) of standard RNA viruses. However, the speculated evolutionary rate of PRRSV seemed too rapid compared with those of standard RNA viruses. Therefore, several researchers took the alternative view. The view is that the two types diverged well before the 1980s, evolved independently on American and European continents, and then emerged in swine on both continents at almost the same time (Nelsen, Murtaugh, and Faaberg 1999; Stadejek et al. 2002; Plagemann 2003). Thus, the divergence time and the evolutionary rate of PRRSV are unclear and deserving of molecular evolutionary analysis.
Furthermore, PRRSV provide an interesting opportunity to study the mechanisms of adaptation of PRRSV to swine because PRRSV may have adapted to swine over a short period of time. The important genes for viral adaptation to the host are usually considered to be those encoding the proteins located in the outside of the virion, where they interacted with the environment, including the host immune system. In PRRSV, there are nine open reading frames (ORFs). ORF1a1b, ORF2a2b, ORF35, ORF6, and ORF7 encode replication proteins, unknown structure proteins, envelope proteins, membrane proteins, and nucleocapsid proteins, respectively. Among these, ORFs 3, 4, 5, and 6 are known to be the genes encoding the outside components of the PRRSV virion. These ORFs are therefore considered to be important candidates for their adaptation to swine. Adaptive regions can be detected through inference of positively selected sites, which preferentially undergo amino acid replacements. Positively selected sites may provide important information not only for studying the adaptive evolution of PRRSV but also for developing vaccines.
The overall goal of our study is to understand when PRRSV emerged, how rapidly PRRSV evolved, and how PRRSV have adapted to swine. For these purposes, we estimated the rate of synonymous substitution and the divergence time of PRRSV by molecular evolutionary analysis. Furthermore, the positively selected sites in PRRSV genes (ORFs 36) were inferred to detect the adaptive sites for swine.
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Materials and Methods |
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The Synonymous Substitution Rate and Divergence Time of PRRSV
The nucleotide sequences of the whole envelope region (ORFs 3, 4, and 5) of PRRSV-A were collected from the INSD. PRRSV-A strains whose years of isolation were known were used in the present study. Wild strains isolated after 1995 were excluded from the analysis because they included vaccine-derived strains. The accession number and the isolation time of each sequence used are shown in Supplementary Materials. The synonymous substitution rate and divergence time of PRRSV were estimated by both the distance-based method and the maximum likelihood method.
In the distance-based method, the nucleotide sequences of PRRSV-A, PRRSV-E, and LDEV were aligned by ClustalW. A phylogenetic tree was constructed by the maximum likelihood method using the HKY (gamma) model (PAUP* version 4.0b) (Hasegawa, Kishino, and Yano 1985). To estimate the most recent ancestral sequence for PRRSV-A and PRRSV-E, LDEV was used as the out-group in the phylogenetic tree because LDEV is the closest virus to PRRSV among the known viruses of Arteriviridae. The ancestral sequence was estimated by the nucleotide model of the likelihood approach (PAML version 3.13) (Yang, Kumar, and Nei 1995). The number of synonymous substitutions between the ancestral sequence and each PRRSV-A sequence was estimated by the Nei-Gojobori model (Nei and Gojobori 1986). The year of isolation and the synonymous distance were plotted for each viral sequence in the two-dimensional space, and both the synonymous substitution rate of PRRSV-A and the divergence time between PRRSV-A and PRRSV-E were estimated by the least squares method (Suzuki, Yamaguchi-Kabata, and Gojobori 2000). The standard error of the divergence time was estimated by the bootstrap method under the assumption that the topology of the phylogenetic tree was correct. We constructed 500 sets of sequence alignments by randomly sampling each codon from the original alignment (Nei and Kumar 2000).
In the maximum likelihood method, the nucleotide sequences of PRRSV-A and PRRSV-E were aligned by ClustalW. Using PRRSV-E as the out-group, a phylogenetic tree was constructed by the Neighbor-Joining method. Then, we estimated both the synonymous substitution rate of PRRSV-A and the divergence time of PRRSV using the software PAML including TIPDATE algorithm (Rambaut 2000).
Nucleotide Sequence Data for Inferring Positively Selected Sites in the Genes Encoding the Outside Component of the Virion
To detect positively selected sites in the genes encoding the outer component of the PRRSV virion, ORFs 3, 4, 5, and 6 of PRRSV-A strains were collected from the INSD. Sequences including undetermined nucleotides and gaps were eliminated from the present analysis. Consequently, the numbers of sequences used for ORF3, ORF4, ORF5, and ORF6 were 31, 30, 141, and 41, respectively. A multiple alignment was made for each coding region using ClustalW. Positively selected amino acid sites were identified using the method of Suzuki and Gojobori (1999; Suzuki, Gojobori, and Nei 2001). In this method, a phylogenetic tree was constructed by the Neighbor-Joining method using the number of synonymous substitutions. The ancestral sequence was inferred at each node of the phylogenetic tree using the maximum parsimony method (Hartigan 1973). Then, the average numbers of synonymous (sS) and nonsynonymous (sN) sites and the total numbers of synonymous (cS) and nonsynonymous (cN) substitutions throughout the phylogenetic tree were estimated for each codon site. The probability (P) of obtaining the observed or more biased numbers of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions was computed for each codon site, assuming a binomial distribution. In the computation, sS/(sS + sN) and sN/(sS + sN) were used as the probabilities of the occurrence of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions, respectively. The number of synonymous substitutions per synonymous site (ds) and that of nonsynonymous substitutions per nonsynonymous site (dn) were estimated by cS/sS and cN/sN, respectively. The transmembrane and signal peptide regions of the envelope genes (ORFs 3, 4, 5, and 6) were estimated by TMPRED version 2.0 (Hofmann and Stoffel 1993).
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Results and Discussion |
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The rate of synonymous substitution estimated here was the highest among RNA viruses so far reported (Ellen et al. 1996; Suzuki and Gojobori 1998; Jenkins et al. 2002). We suggest two hypotheses for the extraordinarily rapid rate of PRRSV evolution, given the assumption that the rate of synonymous substitution is approximately equal to the mutation rate. The first is that the rate of replication error for PRRSV is extraordinarily high, and the second is that the number of replications per unit time (replication frequency) for PRRSV is extraordinarily high. To investigate support for these hypotheses, we compared the rate of replication error with the synonymous substitution rate among five RNA viruses, including PRRSV, as shown in table 2. In table 2, the replication error rate of PRRSV was estimated as follows. We first estimated the error rate per passage from the number of nucleotide substitutions occurring among passages (Yuan et al. 2001). Then, the replication error rate was estimated by the passage error rate divided by the time required for viral budding (Dea et al. 1995). The rates of replication error for other four RNA viruses were collected from literature (Holland et al. 1990; Schrag, Rota, and Bellini 1999; Stech et al. 1999; Escarmis et al. 2002). We also estimated the rates of synonymous substitution for these four RNA viruses (table 2). The results show that replication error rate is approximately equal between PRRSV and other RNA viruses. Even RNA viruses that have rates of synonymous substitution that are very different from PRRSV have replication error rates that are almost the same as that of PRRSV. It follows that the main source for the high synonymous substitution rate of PRRSV is the high replication frequency of PRRSV.
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Positively Selected Sites of Envelope Genes
The positively and negatively selected amino acid sites in ORFs 3, 4, 5, and 6 of PRRSV-A are summarized in figure 5 and table 3. Figure 5 shows that ds exceeded dn at more than half the amino acid sites (470/810, 58.0%) and that negative selection was detected at more than 25% of all amino acid sites (216/810, 26.7%). Nevertheless, we detected sites in which dn exceeded ds. Among the sites where dn exceeded ds, we called a site where the value (1 P) exceeded 0.95, a positively selected site (table 4). In figure 5, there are several sites where dn exceeded ds in the regions experimentally recognized as the B-cell epitopes of ORFs 3, 4, and 5 (Oleksiewicz et al. 2001; Ostrowski et al. 2002; Plagemann, Rowland, and Faaberg 2002), although (1 P) did not exceed 0.95 at these sites. The ectodomain identified in ORF6 by TMPRED contained a positively selective site. This site may be susceptible to attack by the immune system. PRRSV may have escaped from the immune system of swine through replacements of such amino acid sites. These adaptive sites may also provide important information for developing vaccines for PRRSV because antibodies against the regions including adaptive sites could become ineffective after amino acid replacement at these sites. To develop an effective vaccine against PRRSV, it will be necessary to make a vaccine highly expressing the regions related to immunity but not those including adaptive sites (Suzuki 2004).
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The function of the transmembrane regions is to recognize the host cell membrane and attach to it. It has been reported that the transmembrane regions and the signal peptide are specific to a given membrane in terms of at least the expression level of a gene (Schatz and Dobberstein 1996). Therefore, the positive selection of the membrane regions in ORF5 is considered to be important for adaptation of PRRSV to the membrane of swine cells. In fact, PRRSV emerged so suddenly in swine only about 20 years ago and may have not yet adapted completely to swine cells. Given these circumstances, we speculate that PRRSV transferred from another host to swine in about 1980 and adapted to swine cells by altering the transmembrane regions of ORF5.
One of the potential problems of the Suzuki and Gojobori method (1999) for detecting positively selected amino acid sites was that the multiple substitutions were not taken into account in the estimation of the numbers of synonymous and nonsynonymous substitutions. However, as long as the nucleotide sequences compared are relatively closely related, the number of multiple substitutions would be sufficiently small so that the results obtained appear to be reliable (Saitou 1989). Indeed, in the present analysis, the branch lengths of the phylogenetic tree were very small (on average, 0.031, 0.029, 0.018, and 0.025 per synonymous site in ORFs 3, 4, 5, and 6, respectively).
It should also be noted that it is possible that the hitchhiking effect caused by strong positive selection as indicated above raised the rate of synonymous substitution for PRRSV. However, it appears that the increase in synonymous substitution is less affected by the hitchhiking effect than the effect of replication frequency because it has been reported that the hitchhiking effect minimally affects synonymous substitution (Birky and Walsh 1988).
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Conclusions |
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Supplementary Material |
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Acknowledgements |
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Footnotes |
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References |
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