Abstract
The main heroine traffic from Yunnan province to the Xinjiang Autonomous Region is believed to initiate the transmission of CRF07_BC which is the predominant strain in intravenous drug users (IDUs) in China. However, the great distances between Yunnan and Xinjiang lead to an unclear and elusive diffusion process of CRF07_BC due to the absence of an important middle site such as Sichuan province. Moreover, in recent years the rapidly increasing infection rate among IDUs in the Liangshan region of Sichuan made it necessary to characterize the genetic character of the circulating strain of Sichuan IDUs. In this study, we characterized the genetic character of seven newly isolated CRF07_BC genomes (five from Sichuan and two from Xinjiang) and analyzed the transmission linkage among strains from IDUs in different regions. By conducting Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis and reconstruction of neighbor-joining trees and maximum-likelihood trees, our results revealed the genetic variation and important role of Sichuan-derived CRF07_BC strains during the transmission of CRF07_BC.