Abstrakt
A total of 273 clinical samples were obtained from patients exhibiting symptoms of varicella zoster virus (VZV) infection manifested as chickenpox or herpes zoster (HZ) treated in the Faculty Hospital of Charles University, Medical School in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic Characterization of individual VZV strains was performed utilizing restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs), PCR and sequencing. Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) in the open reading frames (ORF) 21, 22 and 50 were used to identify individual VZV strains.
All clinical isolates (97 from varicella, 176 from herpes zoster) were VZV positive wild-type strains. Sequencing analysis showed that 89 isolates were of the European E1 genotype, 180 were of the European E2 genotype and 2 were identified as the Mosaic M1 strain.
In addition, two unusual genotypes were identified, both representing a combination of E1 and M2 strain specific SNPs. Our prospective VZV genotyping study is the first one monitoring the situation in Czech Republic using such a large set of clinical specimens