The Public Health Importance of Flaviviruses as an Etiological Environmental Factor in Nonsyndromic Cleft Lip and/or Palate: In silico Study

Abstract

This in silico study aims to investigate flaviviruses as an environmental factor in the etiology of nonsyndromic cleft lip and/or palate (CL/P). A scoring method with 7 topics—disease, transplacental passage, tropism, cellular damage, reported case, analysis of genome similarity, and transcriptome between virus and host, was created based on literature and in silico experimentation. Viral genomes of NCBI virus were obtained and BLAST 2.12.0 was applied for the similarity analysis, adjusted to search for only human sequences related to CL/P with the statistical threshold defined for E-value ≤1. Flaviviruses with high potential to cause CL/P were: serotypes 2, 3, and 4 of the Dengue virus and lineage 2 of the West Nile virus, while the Yellow Fever virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, Tick-borne encephalitis virus, and Saint Louis encephalitis virus presented with medium potential to cause CL/P. As for the Zika virus, even strains associated with microcephaly showed only medium potential. Dengue virus and West Nile virus presented with high potential to act as environmental factors in the etiology of CL/P.