To evaluate phylogenetic evidence of recombination, trees were constructed for the putative recombinant region and for the concatenated regions of NS3 from both sides of the crossover points. As shown in Figure 3 , ML and Bayesian reconstructions contrast the placement of LIV in the two partitions: In the nonrecombinant partition, LIV groups with SSEV with maximum support and falls outside the highly supported W-TBEV clade (BS 99%, PP 1.00). In contrast, LIV is well embedded within the W-TBEV clade and is placed together with Neudoerfl for the recombinant partition. Although the two most supported nodes that identify close evolutionary relationships between LIV and a strain from W-TBEV display moderate BS and PP (78% and 0.92 for the branching with Neudoerfl, 89% and 0.99 for the inclusion of LIV within W-TBEV), they are among the most significantly supported nodes in this tree. We tested the three putative recombinant fragments obtained by different methods in RDP3 and found that the shorter segment branched together with Neudoerfl with higher support values. Hence, we proceed with further characterization of this mosaic history under the assumption that crossovers occurred at nucleotides 5787 and 5991, which places the 204 nt long recombination in the highly conserved helicase domain of NS3 (subdomain 3). At the nucleotide level, the comparison of the daughter with its parental strains revealed 23 variable sites within the putative recombinant element, while the rest of the NS3 gene contained 274 variable sites. A comparison of genetic distances based on nucleotide sequence is reported in Table 2 .