Identification of a Torque Teno Mini Virus (TTMV) in Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Patients

At least twelve percent of human cancers are caused by virus infection. To understand whether other viruses are associated with human cancers, a viral metagenomics approach was used to analyze the composition of the viral communities of the serum of the patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In this report, a human anellovirus TTMV named TTMV-SH was discovered from three patients with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. The complete genome of TTMV-SH is 2812nt in length. Phylogenetic analysis based on ORF1 indicated that TTMV-SH of the 11 isolates cluster with TTMV strain TLMV-CBD231 sharing only 60.3%-62% sequence similarity, and the sequences divergence is 41.5%-43.1%, which indicates that TTMV-SH is a novel species. The TTMV-SH prevalence in HL group, especially in nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's lymphomas (NCHL), was significantly higher than in the healthy group implicated that the TTMV-SH may be associated with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, especially NCHL.