Sahar O Khalil^1,, Khalid A Enan², Ali. Y. H³, Bashir Salim⁴, Isam M Elkhidir⁵

Background: The present study was to investigate the incidence of the respiratory syncytial virus infection in children and to characterize the RSV circulating in Khartoum state during 2011-12 winter seasons. Methodology: Throat swab specimens collected from 224 children less than 5 years old, with respiratory tract infections admitted at Khartoum Hospitals in winter season (2011- 2012), were screened for RSV using direct immunofluorescence assay (DFA) and reverse transcription- polymerase chain reaction (RT-). Isolation in cell culture followed by nucleotide sequencing and bioinformatics analysis based on the G gene, were done for the RT- positive RSV samples. Results: Out of 224 patients, RSV infections were detected in 136 (60.7%) patients, by using DFA technique, and 44 (19.6%) patients using RT-PCR. 22 strains of RSV were isolated in Hep-2 cell line. The clinical symptoms including Bronchiolitis, Pneumonia, Asthma and Allergy showed significantly different rates (p<0.05) in having RSV infection, (P-value = 0.017, 0.002, 0.0001, 0.0001) respectively. Bioinformatics analysis of nucleotide sequences of 7 cell culture isolated RSV strains revealed that all analyzed RSV belonged to the RSV-A genotype. Phylogenetic tree of RSV-A sequences showed that, all Sudanese strains were grouped with strains from Belgium and Saudi Arabia. Conclusions: This is the first report on molecular characterization that describes the circulation of RSV genotype in Sudan. DFA and RT-PCR offers rapid methods for detection of RSV in hospitalized children with Respiratory tract infection (RTI).

respiratory tract infection, respiratory syncytial viruses, reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, direct immunofluorescence assay, khartoum