Identification of a Torque Teno Mini Virus (TTMV) in Hodgkin's Lymphoma Patients

At least 12% of human cancers are caused by virus infection. To understand whether other viruses are associated with human cancers, a viral metagenomics approach was used to analyze the composition of the viral communities of the serum of the patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL) and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In this report, a human anellovirus TTMV named TTMV-SH was discovered from three patients with HL. The complete genome of TTMV-SH is 2812nt in length. Phylogenetic analysis based on ORF1 indicated that TTMV-SH of the 11 isolates cluster with TTMV strain TLMV-CBD231 sharing only 60.3-62% sequence similarity, and the sequences divergence is 41.5-43.1%, which indicates that TTMV-SH is a novel species. The TTMV-SH prevalence in HL group, especially in nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's lymphomas (NSHL), was significantly higher than in the healthy group implicated that the TTMV-SH may be associated with HL, especially NSHL.