Evolution and diversity of papillomaviruses: codon usage bias and phenotypic presentation of the infection

ATTENTION: En raison des mesures de restriction d’accès au Campus Triolet, les personnes extérieures à l’Université de Montpellier doivent venir munies de: AFFICHE IMPRIMÉE + UNE PIECE D'IDENTITÉ.

One in five human cancers is liked to an infection, essentially by papillomaviruses, hepatitis viruses or Helicobacter pylori. Papillomaviruses (PVs) are small dsDNA viruses and display large genotypic diversity. Virtually all amniotes are the hosts to a large number of PVs, and virtually all individuals are infected by several PVs from very early in life. The phenotypic manifestations of PV infections are also very diverse, as most infections are asymptomatic, some of them cause ugly but benign very productive lesions, and only very few persistent infections eventually lead to a cancer. Despite considerable research and findings in the basic and medical biology of PVs in the last 30 years, our knowledge on their origin and evolution is still scarce and based rather on tacit assumptions than on scientifically tested/testable hypothesis based on real data. PVs are thus regarded to be static, evolving very slowly, and making it unnecessary to incorporate viral evolution into our biological, medical and epidemiological models. I have very recently joined the evolutionary research community at Montpellier, and I want to explicitly challenge this static view with the research programme I would like to develop here. In this talk I will (briefly) present some basics of PV diversity and evolution and I will focus on the match between codon usage preferences in PVs on the one hand and the phenotypic manifestations of the viral infection on the other, linking these findings with the editing activity of C>T mammalian APOBEC3 internal mutators on viral genomes.

Bravo IG and Félez-Sánchez M. Papillomaviruses: viral evolution, cancer and evolutionary medicine. Evol Med Public Health. 2015 Jan 28;2015(1):32-51.

Garcia-Perez, R, Ibanez C, Godinez JM, Arechiga N, Garin I, Perez-Suarez G, de Paz O, Juste J, Echevarria JE, Bravo IG. Novel papillomaviruses in free-ranging Iberian bats: no virus-host co-evolution, no strict host specificity and hints for recombination. Genome Biol Evol (2014) 6(1):94-104.