Genome sequences of chikungunya virus isolates circulating in midwestern Brazil

Chikungunya virus (CHIKV) is a reemerging arbovirus of the family Togaviridae that causes CHIKV fever, a disease that can extend from weeks to years depending on whether clinical signs of arthralgia persist. CHIKV is mainly transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes and possibly reached the Americas in 2013, causing an outbreak in Brazil in 2015. So far, two evolutionary lineages of CHIKV have been reported in Brazil: the Asian and the East-Central-South African (ECSA) lineages. In this study, six CHIKV isolates circulating in midwestern Brazil (Mato Grosso state) were isolated from patient sera, and their complete genomes were sequenced using a high-throughput sequencing platform. All of these isolates shared high nucleotide sequence similarity with CHIKV isolates from northeastern Brazil and were found to belong to the ECSA lineage. These CHIKV isolates did not contain the A226V or L210Q mutations that are associated with increased transmissibility by A. albopictus, suggesting that the CHIKV isolates circulating in midwestern Brazil are predominantly transmitted by A. aegypti.