Identification of Merkel Cell Polyomavirus from a Patient with Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) is an oncogenic virus associated with Merkel cell carcinoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer with a high (>30%) mortality rate. The virus has a high incidence in patients with immunosuppressed conditions, such as AIDS or leukemia, or following organ transplantation. Here, we report the complete genomic sequence of MCPyV identified from a blood sample from a patient with acute myeloid leukemia.

GENOME ANNOUNCEMENT

Merkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) is one of the 10 microorganisms designated carcinogenic by the International Agency for Cancer Research (1). The virus was first described in 2008, using a digital transcriptomic subtraction method (2). MCPyV is an icosahedral nonenveloped double-stranded DNA virus belonging to the Polyomaviridae family. The virus is associated with Merkel cell carcinoma, an aggressive form of skin cancer, and has a high incidence in immunosuppressed patients, especially in those with AIDS or chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and following organ transplants. The virus can also be found on healthy skin, causing no symptoms (3).

Here, we report the complete sequence of MCPyV identified in a blood sample from a 48-year-old male patient with acute myeloid leukemia. Sequencing was performed using a HiSeq 2500 instrument (4), and the viral sequence was assembled using RTG Core 3.4, resulting in 64× average coverage. Our assembly showed >99.9% identity to the reference strain NC_010277.2 (gi|733573629), with five mutations (A1203G, C1213T, G2034C, T2088A, and A3190G) detected. The mutations resulted in two amino acid changes (P405S and N1064D) but did not affect cleavage sites (5), and there were no changes in open reading frames.

Accession number(s).

The whole-genome sequence has been deposited in GenBank using BankIt under accession number KX827417.