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. 2012 Mar 6;7(3):e33122. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033122

Figure 1. Phylogenetic tree of HBV-precore/core and HBV-polymerase region.

Figure 1

The analysis was performed on 3 out 6 incident cases, 2 out 3 prevalent cases, 2 additional cases identified during the enhanced surveillance period and on elute from the mp-LD (red codes). The phylogenetic trees also include 10 (precore/core) and 13 (polymerase) sequences of the genotype D HBV from patients not related to the outbreak who were referred to the laboratory for diagnostic purpose (black codes) and 3 genotype D sequences from GenBank (blue codes). The analysis shows that all patients within the study were infected with a genotype D HBV. In addition one prevalent cases (index case; CC-0), 3 incident cases (confirmed cases; CC-1, CC-2 and CC-3) and the elute from multi-patients lancing device (mp-LD) where infected with a highly related HBV molecular variant. In fact, these molecular variants form a monophyletic cluster distinct from the other sequences by very high bootstrap value (red box). In contrast one prevalent case (excluded case CE-58) and the 2 cases (excluded cases; CE-55 and CE-77) detected during the enhanced surveillance were infected with unrelated HBV molecular variants. The epidemiologically unrelated cases, both form our laboratory archive and from GenBanK, were infected with genetically distant variants as expected. Boxes indicate the epidemic cluster; the bars indicate the genetic distance.