Re-Emergence of a West Nile Virus (WNV) Variant in South Spain with Rapid Spread Capacity.

West Nile Virus (WNV) is a mosquito vector-borne zoonosis with an increasing incidence in Europe that has become a public health concern. In Spain, although local circulation has been known for decades, until 2020, when a large outbreak occurred, West Nile Virus cases were scarce and mostly occurred in southern Spain. Since then, there have been new cases every year and the pathogen has spread to new regions. Thus, monitoring of circulating variants and lineages plays a fundamental role in understanding WNV evolution, spread and dynamics. In this study, we sequenced WNV consensus genomes from mosquito pools captured in 2022 as part of a newly implemented surveillance program in southern Spain and compared it to other European, African and Spanish sequences. Characterization of WNV genomes in mosquitoes captured in 2022 reveals the co-circulation of two WNV lineage 1 variants, the one that caused the outbreak in 2020 and another variant that is closely related to variants reported in Spain in 2012, France in 2015, Italy in 2021-2022 and Senegal in 2012-2018. The geographic distribution of these variants indicates that WNV L1 dynamics in southern Europe include an alternating dominance of variants in some territories.

Characterization of French and Spanish dry-cured hams: influence of the volatiles from the muscles and the subcutaneous fat quantified by SPME-GC.

The influence of the volatile compounds on the characterization of Spanish and French dry-cured hams was studied. Thirty volatiles were quantified in each one of four locations (biceps femoris, semimembranosus and semitendinosus muscles and subcutaneous fat) of 29 dry-cured hams by solid-phase microextraction gas-chromatography (SPME-GC). The Brown-Forsythe univariate test allowed determination of the volatiles that individually could characterize (p<0.05) the samples by their geographical origin (France, Spain) and breed type (Iberian, white). Stepwise linear discriminant procedure, under very strict conditions (F-to-Enter for a F-distribution>0.95), then selected the most remarkable volatile compounds. Four compounds from the subcutaneous fat (methyl benzene and octanol) and the semitendinosus muscle (2-butanone and 2-octanone) allowed 100% correct classifications by geographic origin. On the other hand, only two compounds from the subcutaneous fat (octanol) and the biceps femoris muscle (3-methyl 1-butanol) correctly classified all the samples by the breed type. The ability of these variables to classify the samples was checked by the unsupervised procedure of principal components.