HEVnet: a One Health, collaborative, interdisciplinary network and sequence data repository for enhanced hepatitis E virus molecular typing, characterisation and epidemiological investigations

Abstract

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a common cause of acute hepatitis worldwide. In Europe, HEV is a zoonosis transmitted via contaminated pork meat or other pork food products. Genotype 3 is the most prevalent HEV type in the animal reservoir, as well as in humans. Despite an increased incidence of hepatitis E across Europe, much remains unknown about its spread, sources and transmission routes. A One Health approach is crucial to better understand the (molecular) epidemiology of HEV. HEVnet was established in April 2017 as a network and database for sharing sequences and accompanying metadata collected from human, animal, food and environmental sources. HEVnet members working in the public health, veterinary health, food, environmental and blood safety sectors have submitted 1,615 HEV sequences from nine countries as at January 2019. Most are from humans (89%), and sequences of animal (5%), food (6%) or environmental (0.3%) origin are rare. Metadata for human sequences capture mostly sex (93%), year of birth (92%) and sampling (100%); data on region of sampling (37%) and clinical information (hospitalisation 27%, symptoms 20% or mortality 8%) are limited. HEVnet aims to expand into a global network capable of performing cross-sectoral and supranational studies, with a joint repository of molecular and epidemiological data on HEV.

Update: proposed reference sequences for subtypes of hepatitis E virus (species Orthohepevirus A)

“…An accessible and standard methodology for subtype allocation is important so that researchers can assign strains to particular subtypes. Online tools that have recently become available for the genotyping and subtyping of HEV sequences include HEV-GLUE (http://hev.glue.cvr.ac.uk) [26] and HEVnet (https://www.rivm.nl/mpf/typingtool/hev/) [27]. These tools can be used to make subtype assignments based on the analysis of HEV subgenomic sequences.…”

Emergent subtype of hepatitis E virus genotype 3 in wild boar in Spain

“…The consensus sequence was obtained using Seqman Software SeqMan NGen® Version 12.0 (DNASTAR). Subtype assignment and phylogenetic analyses were performed using the HEVnet genotyping tool (https://www.rivm.nl/mpf/typingtool/hev/) (Mulder et al, ) and confirmed by BLAST. Sequence alignments were generated by the MAFFT online service: multiple sequence alignment, interactive sequence choice and visualization.…”

Molecular Characterization of HEV Genotype 3 in Italy at Human/Animal Interface

“…Reference HEV-3 sequences of established and recently proposed subtypes (n = 15) (Smith et al, 2016;Miura et al, 2017;De Sabato et al, 2018) were included in the tree for the HEV-3 assignment. Those sequences not belonging to any subtypes defined so far were aligned with sequences of the HEVnet dataset (Mulder et al, 2019) using the public HEVnet typing tool 3 .…”