基于保守序列挖掘的乙型肝炎病毒进化研究

A Primary Study of Evolution of Hepatitis B Virus Based on Motif Discovery

乙型肝炎是一种十分严重的全球性传染疾病,乙型肝炎病毒(Hepatitis B virus,HBV)是导致乙型肝炎的直接原因。而HBV突变是乙肝病毒进化过程中的一个重要部分,近几年,国内外针对HBV突变进行了广泛研究。但是,对乙肝病毒序列中保守序列的研究为仍处于起步阶段。本文首先采用MEME(Multiple EM for motif elicitation)算法挖掘HBV基序(生物序列中的保守序列片段,即Motif),并提出了一种新的度量标准保守指数(Conserved index,CI),然后对HBV序列进行系统发育分析,最后对构建的系统发育树进行可靠性评价。结果表明,新的度量标准CI可以有效地利用MEME方法挖掘出多个保守序列,进行HBV序列的系统发育树构建,进而分析HBV序列之间的进化关系,并可以找出样本可能的祖先序列。本文的实验方法对HBV大数据集分析方法的研究有积极地启示作用。

Hepatitis B is a serious infectious disease worldwide, and hepatitis B virus （HBV） is the direct cause of this disease. In recent years, as an essential part of its evolutionary process, HBV mutation has been extensively studied domestically and globally. However, the study on the conserved sequences in HBV sequences is still in its infancy. In this study, we applied multiple EM for motif elicitation （MEME） algorithm to discover HBV motif and proposed a new metric, conservative index （CI）, to carry out phylo- genetic analysis based on HBV sequences. Then, the constructed phylogenetic tree was subjected to reliability assessment. The results demonstrated that the new metric CI combined with the MEME algorithm can effectively help to discover motifs in HBV sequences and construct a phylogenetic tree based on them and to analyze the evolutionary relationship between HBV sequences; in addition, the possible ancestral sequences of samples may be obtained by conservative analysis. The proposed method is valuable for the exploratory study on large HBV sequence data sets.