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David Ussery, Ph.D., led the UAMS team that links hepatitis to kissing bugs.
Kissing Bugs Linked to Hepatitis Virus, UAMS Researchers Say
| A genetics study of hepatitis viruses by a UAMS research team appears to be the first to shed new light on its origins, linking hepatitis A, known for infecting humans and other animals, to an insect virus.
The team and its German-based consultant published the findings in MicrobiologyOpen, providing important new insight for researchers seeking to develop new treatments and vaccines, said David W. Ussery, Ph.D., professor and director of the Arkansas Center for Genomic Epidemiology & Medicine at UAMS.
About 2.3 billion people worldwide are infected with one or more of the hepatitis viruses, which cause inflammation of the liver. Viral hepatitis results in about 1.4 million deaths each year from hepatitis-related cirrhosis and liver cancer, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Several viral families of hepatitis can cause liver inflammation, and Ussery’s team compared thousands of genomes from three common families of Hepatitis viruses (hepatitis A, C and E).
For the hepatitis A family, the team found the viruses to be strikingly similar to that of Triatoma virus, which infects blood-sucking kissing bugs.
“We postulate that perhaps the ancestor of the current Hepatitis A family might have originally lived in insects, and more recently has changed so that now it can be transmitted via contaminated drinking water, through blood, and through close body contact or shared needles,” Ussery said.
Ussery, who holds the Helen Adams & Arkansas Research Alliance Endowed Chair in Biomedical Informatics, and his team have developed cutting-edge computational tools for high-throughput comparison of genomes.
“The work we’re doing with the hepatitis viruses is kind of a simple example of where I want to go in the future,” Ussery said, noting that viral genomes are relatively small (a few thousand characters long), versus bacterial genomes (a thousand times longer), and the human genome, which is a million times longer.
“This is a good test case that will allow us to build tools for better comparisons for bacterial genomes, and also for the much larger human genomes,” he said.
Their study found that hepatitis C and E are in some ways similar to the Flaviviruses, such as Zika and West Nile viruses, and might have originally lived in insects, as well.
The team found that hepatitis C is the most diverse in terms of differences within the viral family. It is also one of the most common forms of infection, often transmitted through infected needles and tainted donor blood. Hepatitis E is most often transmitted through fecal contaminated water or through uncooked meat.
In addition to Ussery, the UAMS authors on the publication are Se-Ran Jun, Ph.D., and Mike Robeson, Ph.D., both assistant professors in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Jun’s research involves viral genomics, and Robeson is an expert in phyogenomic analysis, building the phylogenetic trees — branching diagrams that show the evolutionary relationships of the viruses — for the published paper. Ussery also hired a consultant for the study, Trudy Wassenaar, Ph.D., with Molecular Microbiology and Genomics Consultants in Zotzenheim, Germany, who is lead author on the paper.
The research was supported by National Institutes of Health/National Institute for General Medical Sciences grant 1P20GM121293, and from the Helen Adams & Arkansas Research Alliance Endowment in the Department of Biomedical Informatics, UAMS College of Medicine.