VIRAL CLUSTERS: Moriah Szpara uses the Cyber Health visualization wall at Pennsylvania State University to show graduate student Yinan Wan how HSV encodes and assembles its capsid. © TOM KLIMEK
Charles Grose, a virologist at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, was perusing the advance online literature last November when a paper about the genetic diversity of the virus that causes oral herpes—herpes simplex virus 1, or HSV-1—rang a bell (J Virol, 88:1209–27, 2014). Grose was particularly struck by a diagram depicting the geographic clustering of HSV-1 genomes.
The figure compared 26 HSV-1 genome sequences and depicted nearly all of them as being most closely related to strains from the same region of the world. Five of the viral strains isolated in North America and Europe clustered together, but there was one outlier. A North American strain—KOS, named for its original source, virologist Kendall Owen Smith, who isolated the virus from himself in ...
