• A brief study on Sapoviruses as Gastroenteritis viruses in Patients in all age groups.
  • mahshid jamshidi,1,* mahtab dehbozorgi,2 Hanie abbasi ,3
    1. Nursing Branch, Islamic Azad University , Arsenjan , Iran
    2. Departmant of Microbiology , Faculty of Biological Sciences , Shahid Beheshti University , Tehran , Iran
    3. Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Health Services


  • Introduction: Sapovirus (SaV) is one of the primary viral causes of acute gastroenteritis, especially where rotavirus vaccination has been implemented. Sapovirus infections primarily affect children aged <5 years, causing mild to moderate diarrhea and outbreaks in all age groups. SaV has a positive-sense, single stranded RNA genome and belongs to the Caliciviridae family and it infects both humans and animals. Human SaV can be divided into four genogroups (GI, GII, GIV, and GV) and further subdivided into 17 genotypes with 20.1% or more nucleotide variation in the capsid gene. The genomes of SaV GI, GIV, and GV contain three open reading frames (ORFs), whereas, that of SaV GII has two ORFs. In the SaV genome, recombination typically occurs within ORF1 at the junction between the polymerase and capsid genes. Even if numerous epidemiological studies of sapovirus infection have been published worldwide, knowledge of the genetic characteristics of the whole genome of HSaV in Iran is limited.
  • Methods: In this review, we summarized over 60 different studies on HSaV from 2007 to 2019 in Iran and the rest of the world. The most widely used method of detection in these studies is reverse transcription-PCR (RT-PCR), which has a high sensitivity and can also be used for genetic analysis. Real-time RT-PCR is also a useful method and can be practical for molecular epidemiological studies.
  • Results: According to these epidemiological studies in Iran and rest of the world, the majority of these studies (78.6%) investigated on children less than 5 years old and further included all ages. The majority of the studies (49.2%) did not report on the time-frame of detection. The prevalence of HSaV was shown to range from 0.3% to 9.3%.From the 60 studies, only 39 studies reported SV detection with identification of the genogroups/genotypes. Overall detection of SV strains showed SV-GI.1 and GI.2 as the most dominant (90%) strains from different settings of studies.
  • Conclusion: This review provides a summary of studies conducted in developing countries on the detection of human sapovirus. Sapovirus frequently caused infection and diarrhea in young children, even prior to the implementation of a rotavirus vaccine, which may increase the relative importance of sapovirus as a diarrheal pathogen. Findings from this review strongly suggest the need for a triple vaccine that targets rotavirus, norovirus, and sapovirus to prevent diarrhea among children and since it is difficult to culture human SV on cell lines, specialised molecular laboratories are needed for the investigation of such virus in the developing countries.
  • Keywords: Sapovirus – Gastroenteritis – epidemiology – Infection