Alberto Peretti, Eileen M Geoghegan, Diana V Pastrana, Sigrun Smola, Pascal Feld, Marlies Sauter, Stefan Lohse, Mayur Ramesh, Efrem S Lim, David Wang, Cinzia Borgogna, Peter C FitzGerald, Valery Bliskovsky, Gabriel J Starrett, Emily K Law, Reuben S Harris, J Keith Killian, Jack Zhu, Marbin Pineda, Paul S Meltzer, Renzo Boldorini, Marisa Gariglio, Christopher B Buck
BK polyomavirus (BKV) frequently causes nephropathy (BKVN) in kidney transplant recipients (KTRs). BKV has also been implicated in the etiology of bladder and kidney cancers. We characterized BKV variants from two KTRs who developed BKVN followed by renal carcinoma. Both patients showed a swarm of BKV sequence variants encoding non-silent mutations in surface loops of the viral major capsid protein. The temporal appearance and disappearance of these mutations highlights the intra-patient evolution of BKV. Some of the observed mutations conferred resistance to antibody-mediated neutralization...
May 9, 2018: Cell Host & Microbe