BLAST analysis of Monkeypox PT0001 against Influenza H1N1 virus genome sequences

Introduction: The study conducted blastn analysis on the genome sequence of Monkeypox virus (PT0001) against influenza virus H1N1. Considering there is no hitting when blast analysis with the whole length of Monkeypox virus, we spliced the Monkeypox virus genome sequence into segments of 1,000bp with sliding windows of 50bp and then conducted blast analysis on these segments against sequences of influenza virus. Methods: The sequence of Monkeypox virus (strain PT0001, collected on Portgual on 5/4/2022) was spliced into segments of 1,000bp length, with starting positions shifting from 1 to 95 at intervals of 50bp. In total, 20 sets of segments were created. The 20 sets of Monkeypox genome segments were compared against sequences of influenza downloaded from NCBI (https://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/INFLUENZA/) with blastn tools (2.13.0+) on a linux server, respectively. Results: The hits/alignments on variants of influenza H1N1 viruses reported by the blast analysis were retrieved with customized python scripts. Common hits across different sets of Monkeypox genome segments were merged. There were 238 hits reported by blast analysis between 16 Monkeypox segments and 232 Influenza sequences after merging all the blast results from 20 sets of Monkeypox genome segments. The details are available in the accompanying presented dataset.