Evolution of a rare vaccine-derived multirecombinant poliovirus.

Recombination is one of the mechanisms by which viral genomes evolve. A vaccine-derived multirecombinant poliovirus strain was isolated from a 5-month-old child with vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis after oral poliovirus vaccine administration. The isolate had an S2/S1/S2/S1 primary genomic structure as revealed by restriction fragment length polymorphism and sequencing analysis. Recombination of the middle S1/S2 region is extremely rare and one of the few characterized types of recombination with Sabin type 1 as a 5' partner. An attempt was made to perform evolutionary analysis of the contributing sequences using the identified mutations in comparison with the original Sabin sequences. A hypothesis is proposed for the order in which the identified recombination events occurred.