The pathogen of SFTS: Bandavirus dabieense phylogenetic analysis and development of an online tool for genotyping

Bandavirus dabieense (DBV), the pathogen of SFTS that was included in the WHO's list of priority infectious diseases requiring urgent attention in 2017, belongs to a large and highly diverse class of RNA viruses. Currently, the lack of a unified DBV genotyping standard and the confusion among common genotyping systems cause research result discrepancies and limit the clinical use of genotype data. Here, we re-clustered 738 DBV S-segment sequences from GenBank and identified seven clades (DS1-DS7), and elucidated the horizontal relationships among different genotyping results by comparing these clades with three commonly used genotyping strategies in published literature. The predominant genotypes in Japan and South Korea are DS3, DS5, DS7 (77.23 %, 156/202), while in China, DS1, DS2, DS4, DS6 (94.03 %, 504/536) are more prevalent. Additionally, we developed an online DBV genotyping tool based on the DS genotyping strategy to support further genotyping and clinical prognosis research. The tool was validated with 61 clinical samples, all these samples yielded identical DS genotyping results using both the phylogenetic clustering analysis and the online tool, indicating a 100 % concordance among the two methods. These findings provide a standardized genotyping framework for DBV and offer a reliable tool for future research and clinical applications, facilitating better understanding of its epidemiology and disease prognosis.