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Journal of Virology, October 2006, p. 9928-9933, Vol. 80, No. 20
0022-538X/06/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JVI.00441-06
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

JC Virus Evolution and Its Association with Human Populations{dagger}

Laura A. Shackelton,1 Andrew Rambaut,2 Oliver G. Pybus,2 and Edward C. Holmes1,3*

Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, Mueller Laboratory, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802,1 Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PS, United Kingdom,2 Fogarty International Center, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 208923

Received 21 June 2006/ Accepted 3 August 2006

The ubiquitous human polyomavirus JC (JCV) is a small double-stranded DNA virus that establishes a persistent infection, and it is often transmitted from parents to children. There are at least 14 subtypes of the virus associated with different human populations. Because of its presumed codivergence with humans, JCV has been used as a genetic marker for human evolution and migration. Codivergence has also been used as a basis for estimating the rate of nucleotide substitution in JCV. We tested the hypothesis of host-virus codivergence by (i) performing a reconciliation analysis of phylogenetic trees of human and JCV populations and (ii) providing the first estimate of the evolutionary rate of JCV that is independent from the assumption of codivergence. Strikingly, our comparisons of JCV and human phylogenies provided no evidence for codivergence, suggesting that this virus should not be used as a marker for human population history. Further, while the estimated nucleotide substitution rate of JCV has large confidence intervals due to limited sampling, our analysis suggests that this virus may evolve nearly two orders of magnitude faster than predicted under the codivergence hypothesis.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Department of Biology, The Pennsylvania State University, Mueller Laboratory, University Park, PA 16802. Phone: (814) 863-4689. Fax: (814) 865-9131. E-mail: ech15{at}psu.edu.

{dagger} Supplemental material for this article may be found at http://jvi.asm.org/.

Journal of Virology, October 2006, p. 9928-9933, Vol. 80, No. 20
0022-538X/06/$08.00+0     doi:10.1128/JVI.00441-06
Copyright © 2006, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.





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Copyright © 2006 by the American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.