Species C Rotaviruses in Children with Diarrhea in India, 2010–2013: A Potentially Neglected Cause of Acute Gastroenteritis

Abstract

All over the world, children and adults are severely affected by acute gastroenteritis, caused by one of the emerging enteric pathogens, rotavirus C (RVC). At present, no extensive surveillance program is running for RVC in India, and its prevalence is largely unknown except cases of local outbreaks. Here, we intended to detect the presence of RVC in diarrheic children visiting or admitted to hospitals in Haldwani (state of Uttarakhand, India), a city located in the foothills of the Himalayas. During 2010–2013, we screened 119 samples for RVC by an RVC VP6 gene-specific RT-PCR. Of these, 38 (31.93%) were found positive, which is higher than the incidence rates reported so far from India. The phylogenetic analysis of the derived nucleotide sequences from one of the human RVC (HuRVC) isolates, designated as HuRVC/H28/2013/India, showed that the study isolate belongs to genotype I2, P2 and E2 for RVC structural genes 6 and 4 (VP6, and VP4) and non-structural gene 4 (NSP4), respectively. Furthermore, the VP6 gene of HuRVC/H28/2013/India shows the highest similarity to a recently-reported human-like porcine RVC (PoRVC/ASM140/2013/India, KT932963) from India suggesting zoonotic transmission. We also report a full-length NSP4 gene sequence of human RVC from India. Under the One-health platforms there is a need to launch combined human and animal RVC surveillance programs for a better understanding of the epidemiology of RVC infections and for implementing control strategies.

Evolution of rotavirus C in humans and several domestic animal species

“…The extent of RVC diversity identified in US swine has important implications for pathogen control, including the development of porcine RVC vaccines. Although RVC is not considered a clinically important pathogen for human infant mortality due to its milder sporadic and outbreak cases (Bhat et al, ; Meleg et al, ; Moon et al, ), our analysis revealed that the pathogen has been established as an independent lineage in humans for decades, at least, and remains undersampled, as exposed by extremely long branch lengths in the trees. At this time, it is not possible to determine whether the multitude of independently evolving swine lineages arose from viral diversification within pigs, accruing diversity gradually over centuries, or via multiple independent viral introductions into pigs from other RVC hosts that have not been sampled.…”

Metagenomic sequencing generates the whole genomes of porcine rotavirus A, C, and H from the United States

“…Unlikely RVA, the number of whole RVC genome data is limited. However, over the past few years, there has been an increased interest in human and porcine RVCs, and additional whole genome sequences have been published, which help elucidate their zoonotic relationship [17,33,35,37,[61][62][63][64][65][66][67]. While a clade of VP3 segments of RVC strains from humans shared a common ancestor with porcine strains, Bayesian analysis illustrated these human and porcine strains diverged over a hundred years ago [36].…”

Porcine rotavirus C strains carrying human‐like NSP4 and NSP5

“…In recent years, the incidence of RVC infections among humans has increased significantly (Araújo, Heinemann, Fialho, & Leite, 2011; Bhat et al., 2018; Esona, Humphrey, Dennehy, & Jiang, 2008; Joshi, Jare, & Gopalkrishna, 2017). Consequently, it is important to monitor the occurrence of interspecies transmission, particularly that between pigs and humans.…”