VIROLOGY

摘要

Human disease likely attributable to variola virus (VARV), the etiologic agent of smallpox, has been reported in human populations for > 2,000 years. VARV is unique among orthopoxviruses in that it is an exclusively human pathogen. Because VARV has a large, slowly evolving DNA genome, we were able to construct a robust phylogeny of VARV by analyzing concatenated single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from genome sequences of 47 VARV isolates with broad geographic distributions.