Abstract: The assay was aimed to performe a phylogenetic analysis of the complete genome of a rabies virus collected from Beijing city in 2012, and compare the molecular characteristics among this strain and the prevalent strains obtained within China.Brain tissue was obtained from a rabies dog and the direct immunofluorescence assay was carried out to detect rabies virus inclusions.Polymerase chain reaction was used to amplify the genomic nucleotides, which were then fully sequenced and analyzed with the neighbor-joining method.BJ2012ZW strain was a type 1 of Lyssavirus and had a similarity of 83.9% to 99.7% with the prevalent strains in China.Phylogenetic analysis indicated BJ2011E and CNM1101C, which were obtained from Beijing in 2011, shared 99.7% sequence homology with BJ2012ZW strain.Epitopepeptide analysis demonstrated that some of the amino acid residues in G protein were different from the strains for rabies vaccine production in China.BJ2012ZW strain was one of the prevalent strains in China, and the significant differences between BJ2012ZW and vaccine strains indicated the vaccines used might be ineffective in China.

Key words: rabies virus; street virus; complete genome; sequence analysis