Evolutionary analysis of hemagglutinin-neuraminidase (HN) protein of newcastle disease virus

The economy of countries like India mainly depends upon agriculture-based industries. The poultry sector is one of the most important domains in the Indian agricultural diaspora, as the country is the fifth largest egg producer and 18^th largest producer of meat. Newcastle disease is a fatal disease in poultry caused by the Newcastle disease virus (NDV), which expresses the Hemagglutinin-Neuraminidase (HN) protein on its surface. The HN protein is considered as an integral part of the virus infection process. The present study focuses on the evolutionary analysis of the HN) protein of the NDV. The available, 26 amino acid sequences of HN protein were retrieved from NCBI and the sequences were subjected to the multiple sequence alignment (MSA) using the online Clustal omega tool. The MSA results were visualized in the Jalview to observe the conserved regions among the different sequences. MEGA-7 software was used to evaluate the phylogenetic relationship using the Maximum likelihood method with a bootstrap value of 1000. Jones-Taylor-Thornton with Gamma substitution (JTT+G) was found to be the best evolutionary model with the lowest Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and Akaike’s information criterion (corrected) (AICc) scores. The pairwise distance calculation revealed the close relationship of NDV R2B HN protein (Acc. No. AFX98110.1) with H strain (Acc. No. CAA76656) and JS-09 strain. The phylogenetic tree construction predicted HN protein of NDV R2B is closely related to H-strain 9 (China) and the Victoria strain of Australia.