Eight hundred and twenty-seven samples were collected from a group of children consulting the Shanghai Nanxiang Hospital during a 2-year period, and tested for 17 respiratory viruses using a multiplex RT-PCR (mRT-PCR). Sixty-four samples (7.7%) were positive for HRV, according to the length of the amplified fragment in the VP4/VP2 region visualized on agarose gel (data not shown). A larger fragment of 924 nt, including part of the 59UTR (starting at nt 163) and the VP4/VP2 genes (ending at nt 1086), was amplified and cloned into plasmid vectors for genetic analysis (Table 1) . Only one sample, N1, could not be amplified and was amplified in two steps in the 59UTR (nt 163-552) and in the VP4/VP2 region (nt 528-1086), respectively. Analyses of different clones for each sample allowed the identification of multiple infections: sample N16 was shown to contain one HRV-A and one HRV-B (N16A and N16B, respectively), while N58 contained one HRV-A and one HRV-C (N58A and N58C, respectively) (see below). In order to further characterize the 66 HRVs identified in the 64 samples, the nucleotide sequences located in the 59UTR (285 nt) and the VP4/VP2 genes (420 nt) were chosen to allow comparative alignment with sequences of reference serotypes and field strains available in GenBank.