An evolutionary study of the human papillomavirus genomes

Abstract

In this article, we undertake a study of the evolution of Human Papillomaviruses (HPV), whose potential to cause cervical cancer is well known. First, we found that the existing HPV groups are monophyletic and that the high-risk carcinogenicity taxa are usually clustered together. Then, we present a new algorithm for analyzing the information content of multiple sequence alignments in relation to epidemiologic carcinogenicity data to identify regions that would warrant additional experimental analyses. The new algorithm is based on a sliding window procedure looking for genomic regions being responsible for disease. Examination of the genomes of 83 HPVs allowed us to identify specific regions that might be influenced by insertions, deletions, or simply by mutations, and that may be of interest for further analyses. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.