Complete Coding Sequence of Zika Virus from a French Polynesia Outbreak in 2013

Zika virus is an arthropod-borne Flavivirus member of the Spondweni serocomplex, transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. We report here the complete coding sequence of a Zika virus strain belonging to the Asian lineage, isolated from an infected patient returning from French Polynesia, an epidemic area in 2013/2014.

arbovirus originally transmitted in Africa through a sylvatic cycle involving mainly Aedes vectors and nonhuman primates, with humans being occasional hosts (1). Epidemic transmission in a dengue-like Aedes-human-Aedes cycle has been increasingly reported in recent years (2), with nonspecific clinical presentation (influenza-, dengue-or chikungunya-like syndromes) (3).
ZIKV is phylogenetically and antigenically related to Spondweni virus, and based on nonstructural 5 (NS5) gene sequences, three lineages that reflect the East African, West African, or Asian geographic origins have been identified. The expanding distribution area of the virus makes Zika fever an emerging infectious disease, as confirmed by its spread to French Polynesia (FP) since October 2013 (Ͼ8,700 suspected and Ͼ400 laboratory-confirmed cases) (4) (http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/watch/zika-fever -french-polynesia-tahiti). The only previous outbreak reported in the Pacific region was on Yap island in 2007 (5).
Maximum likelihood phylogenetic reconstruction (GTR ϩ G ϩ I model, determined from the data set using the MEGA6 program) indicated that it belonged to the Asian lineage, sharing common ancestorship and ca. 99.9% nt and aa identities with isolates circulating in southern Asia and the Pacific islands in the late 2000s (accession no. JN860885 in Cambodia, 2010, and accession no. EU545988 in Micronesia, 2007). This points to the spread of the Asian lineage, which has been suggested to originate from the introduction of ZIKV in Southeast Asia around 1945 (3,6).
Nucleotide sequence accession number. The virus genome sequence described here has been deposited in the GenBank database under the accession no. KJ776791.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by the project European Virus Archive (EVA) (FP7 CAPACITIES Project GA 22829).
ZIKV strain H/PF/2013 is available through the EVA website under reference no. 1011.