Comparative Genomics of Herpes Simplex Virus 2 Isolated from a Maternal-Neonatal Dyad Reveals High Consensus Sequence Homology as Well as Minor Variant Diversity.

Neonatal herpes simplex virus disease most often occurs following mother-to-neonate transmission during childbirth. However, genomic differences between the maternal and neonatal viral populations are poorly understood. Here, we performed deep whole-genome sequencing of clinical HSV-2 samples obtained from a maternal-neonatal dyad to investigate viral population dynamics during transmission.