Alignment of the VP1 amino acid sequence of HRV-Cc strain N10 with those of other HRV-A and HRV-B species and HRV-Ca subspecies, designated in Table 4 , showed structural features typical of HRV-C species [16, 20, 25] (data not shown). In particular, footprints including deletions in the BC, DE and HI loops and conserved amino acids potentially involved in Inter-Cellular Adhesion Molecule 1 (ICAM-1) receptor binding [7, 11, 20, 24] were conserved within the HRV-C species (data not shown). Bootscanning and similarity plot analysis conducted on the genomic sequences of N4 (HRV-Ca), N10 (HRV-Cc), R16 (HRV-A) and R52 (HRV-B) confirmed that N4 featured a 59UTR sequence that was related to the R16 sequence (stretch I), followed by a capsidic sequence related to the N10 sequence. N4 nonstructural sequence (2A to 39UTR) was related more closely to N10 than to R16 and R52 sequences. However, in stretch II (nt 3300-3500 according to N4 numbering), N4 strain (HRV-Ca) was closer to R16 (HRV-A) than to R52 (HRV-B) or N10 (HRV-Cc), which resulted in high bootstrap values between N4 and R16 2A sequences (Fig. 4) . This may have been the result of a recombination event that occurred in the 39 part of the 2A-encoding sequence of the parental strain N4, and which involved an HRV-A strain. Nevertheless, the HRV-A parental strain or ancestral strain could not be identified since the closest HRV-A 2A nucleotide sequence available was ,80% identical to that of N4 in this region.