Human papillomavirus 52 (HPV52) infection is prevalent in the Chinese population, and variations in HPV52 show correlations with oncogenicity. However, no specific variation in HPV52 was reported to show relevancy to infection characteristics. In this study, we retrieved 222 isolates of E6 and L1 full-length genes from 197 Chinese women with HPV52 infection. After sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree construction, we found that 98.39 % of the collected variants belonged to the sublineage B2 and two variants displayed incongruence between the phylogenetic tree of E6 and L1. The analysis of the infection pattern showed that the presence of C6480A/T mutation in the L1 gene was associated with single infection (P=0.01) and persistent infection (P=0.047) of HPV52, while the A6516G nucleotide change was relevant to transient infection (P=0.018). Our data also indicated that variations T309C in the E6 gene and C6480T, C6600A in L1 were more commonly presented in patients with high-grade cytology (P<0.05). One HPV52 breakthrough infection after vaccination was identified, which hinted at the immune escape post-vaccination. Young coitarche age and non-condom usage were correlated to multiple infections. This study provided insight into the polymorphism of HPV52 and revealed the impact of variations in HPV52 on its infection characteristics.
Keywords: Human papillomavirus; cervical cancer; multiple infection; persistent infection; vaccine breakthrough infection; variation.