A summary of the human polyomaviruses listed in order of discovery and showing their common names, other names, sources, GenBank RefSeq numbers, and the references for their discovery.

aICTV-designated abbreviation is shown in italic [10].
bPolyomavirus BK (BKPyV) was one of the first two human polyomaviruses to be discovered and was first isolated from the urine of a kidney allograft recipient with advanced renal failure by Gardner and coworkers in 1971 [6]. BKPyV causes BKPyV-associated nephropathy (BKVAN) in kidney transplant recipients who receive highly immunosuppressive drugs and is a leading cause of allograft failure.
cIn 1971, polyomavirus JC (JCPyV) was discovered about the same time as BKPyV and was isolated from brain tissue of a patient with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) by Padgett and coworkers [4]. This neurotropic virus is now established as the proven causative agent of PML.
dKarolinska Institute polyomavirus (KIPyV) was identified in 2007 using a large-scale molecular virus screening approach to human diagnostic clinical samples of nasopharyngeal aspirates to search for previously unrecognized viruses by Allander and coworkers [16] at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, which identified a novel polyomavirus, KI polyomavirus (KIPyV).
eWashington University polyomavirus (WUPyV) was also identified in 2007 using a high throughput DNA sequencing approach to a random library generated from a nasopharyngeal aspirate from a 3-year-old child from Australia diagnosed with Pneumonia, at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, another novel polyomavirus, WU [17].
fMerkel cell polyomavirus (MCPyV) [9] was identified in 2008 by Feng et al. in a search to identify unknown agents in a rare type of human malignancy, Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) using digital transcriptome subtraction, which is a bioinformatics method to detect the presence of novel pathogen transcripts by computational removal of host sequences using high-throughput sequencing and comparison to the available high-quality reference genome data of the host.
gHuman polyomavirus-6 and -7 (HPyV6 and HPyV7) were identified in 2010 using rolling circle amplification (RCA) technique to isolate circular DNA viral genomes from human skin swabs and are chronically shed from human skin in the form of assembled virions [27].
hIn 2010, van der Meijden et al. [8] discovered a new human polyomavirus associated with trichodysplasia spinulosa in an immunocompromised patient.
iIn 2011, Scuda et al. [37] in a kidney transplant patient under immunosuppression identified a novel human polyomavirus (HPyV9) by PCR using degenerate primers closely related to the African green monkey-derived lymphotropic polyomavirus in samples from a kidney transplant patient under immunosuppression using generic PCR.
jIn 2012, Siebrasse et al. [38] isolated from a stool sample collected from a healthy child from Malawi (MWV). Later in 2012, Buck et al. [39] used RCA on condyloma specimens from patient with warts, hypogammaglobulinemia, infections, and myelokathexis (WHIM) syndrome and identified a virus, HPyV10, with 95%–99% sequence similarity to MWV.