We first compared and classified Shanghai strains according to their VP4/VP2 sequences. The pairwise nucleotide divergence in the VP4/VP2 region ranged from 0 to 72.2%. Twenty-seven HRVs (40.9%) showed .81% nucleotide identity with the closest HRV-A clusters, and five HRVs (7.6%) showed .88.8% nucleotide identity with HRV-B clusters ( Table 2 ). The remaining 34 strains (51.5%) diverged from HRV-A and HRV-B species by .47.3% in their VP4/VP2 nucleotide sequence ( Table 2) . These strains showed from 68.3 to 100% nucleotide identity with each other and were related to the recently described HRV-C strains, NAT001 and NAT045, isolated in California, USA [18] , C024, C025 and C026 in Hong Kong [20] , and QPM in Australia [7, 24] ( Fig. 1 ). Strains N34, N35 and N68 were closely related to the recently identified strains C025 and NTA001 with .95.9% nucleotide identity, whereas the 31 remaining HRV-C strains showed only 74.4-86.4% nucleotide identity with six other recent strains (QPM, NAT001, NAT045, C024, C025 and C026; Table 2 ), which were classified tentatively as HRV-C species [7, 18, 20, 24] . Classification of the strains into three different species was also demonstrated by construction of a phylogenetic tree using aligned VP4/VP2 sequences (Fig. 1) .