America’s Zika Virus and Its Similarities with African and Asian Lineages

According to the literature, see Enfissi et al. (The Lancet 387(10015):227–228, 2016) there are two Zika lineages, the African (East and West) and the Asian. Phylogenetic studies expose the similarity between the Americas virus and the African genotypes, and also those studies report a strong correspondence between the Americas virus and the Asian strains that circulated in French Polynesia during the 2013–2014 outbreak Enfissi et al. (Lancet 387(10015):227–228, 2016)–Lanciotti et al. (Emerg Inf Diseases 22(5):933, 2016)–Zanluca et al. (Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz 110(4):569–572, 2015) . It has been postulated that the virus originated in East Africa and then spread into both West Africa and Asia around 80–100 years ago. And that the Asian genotype has been gradually evolving and spreading geographically throughout Asia and the Pacific Islands. Thus, a conjecture of closer proximity is established between America’s Zika and Asia’s Zika compared to the proximity between America’s Zika and Africa’s Zika. In this paper, we compare genomic sequences coming from America with collections from Africa and Asia respectively, in order to define if the sequences of America are more similar to the Asian or to the African ones. To proceed with the comparison, we apply a stochastic metric between sequences (see Garc ı́a et al. (Appl Stochas Models Business Ind 34:(6), 868–878, 2018)). We also classify the sequences coming from each set (1) the American collection, (2) the Asian collection, (3) the African collection defining for each set a sequence that represents the collection (see Garc ı́a et al. (Appl Stochas Models Business Ind 34(6):868–878, 2018), Fernández et al. (Math Methods Appl Sci 43:7537–7549, 2020)). With these representative sequences, we show that there is a greater similarity between the sequence coming from America and the Asian one. Based on the Partition Markov Model (see Cordeiro et al. (Math Methods Appl Sci 43:7677–7691, 2020)), we have revealed the stochastic organization of these sequences that justifies our discovery.