• Abhinendra Kumar, Lekshmi S Rajan, Kannan Sabarinath Ps, Anita M Shete, Rima R Sahay, Deepak Y Patil, Nayana Ingole, Kaveri K, Anupama Cherayi Padinakarai, Shantala Gb, Jayanthi Shastri, Shashiraja Padukone, Yash Joshi, Savita Patil, Triparna Majumdar, Ajay Verma, Jyoti Yemul, Nandini Shende, Vaishnavi Kumari, Pratiksha Vedpathak, Shubhangi Sathe, Pranita Gawande, and Pragya D Yadav.
• Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Virology, Pune, India.
• Ann. Med. 2023 Jan 1; 55 (2): 22537332253733.

BackgroundThe multi-country mpox outbreak across the globe has led to the systematic surveillance of mpox cases in India. During the surveillance of mpox, we encountered cases of Varicella Zoster Virus (VZV) in suspected mpox cases amongst children & adults. This study focused on the genomic characterization of VZV in India.MethodsA total of 331 mpox suspected cases were tested for VZV through real-time PCR, and the positive samples were subjected to next-generation sequencing to retrieve the whole genome of VZV using CLC genomics software. Phylogenetic analysis has been done in MEGA 11.0 software to identify circulating clades.ResultOf the 331 suspected cases, 28 cases with vesicular rashes were found to be positive for VZV. The maximum genome could be retrieved from the clinical specimens of 16 cases with coverage greater than 98% when mapped with reference strain Dumas (NC 001348). The phylogenetic analyses of these sequences determined the circulation of clades 1, 5, and 9 in India. Further, the sequence analysis demonstrated non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphism (SNPs) among specific ORF of VZV including ORF 14, ORF 22, ORF 36, ORF 37 and ORF 51. Although clade 1 and 5 has been reported earlier, the circulation of clade 9 of VZV has been determined for the first time in India.ConclusionAlthough the circulation of different clades of VZV was reported from India, the presence of clade 9 was detected for the first time during the mpox surveillance.

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