Toward unified molecular surveillance of RSV: A proposal for genotype definition

Background:

Human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is classified into antigenic subgroups A and B. Thirteen genotypes have been defined for RSV-A and 20 for RSV-B, without any consensus on genotype definition. We evaluated clustering of RSV sequences published in GenBank until February 2018 to define genotypes by using maximum likelihood and Bayesian phylogenetic analyses and average p-distances. We propose an objective protocol for RSV genotyping suitable for adoption as an international standard to support the global expansion of RSV molecular surveillance.