ABSTRACT
The human bocavirus (HBoV) was discovered for the first time in the year 2005 by Tobias Allander and coworkers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. A novel marker for the prediction of the severity of the bocavirus infection could be the viral load and mutation pattern of conserved genes, although this hypothesis has to be confirmed by further studies that take into account the diversity of the HBoV strains in more detail. The genome organization resembles those of other members of the genus Bocavirus and, thus, besides phylogeny, is a typical feature of the parvoviruses: the large, left open reading frame encodes for the nonstructural protein non-structural protein 1 (NS1). NS1 is assumed to act as a multifunctional enzyme during the viral life cycle replication, is essential for DNA replication, and may be involved in cell cycle arrest and gene transactivation.
