Complete or nearly-complete HEV genome sequences were collected by searching for “[Hepatitis E]”[porgn:__txid1678143] in the nucleotide database of NCBI GenBank, and filtering for sequence lengths > 6000 bp. The search had 674 hits (as of January 19, 2021). All sequences were downloaded (as complete record, fasta file) and run through Hepatitis E virus genotyping tool version 0.1 (https://www.rivm.nl/mpf/typingtool/hev/, accessed January 19, 2021) to verify that they were correctly classified as Ortohepevirus A (see the file "typing_results.txt"). All sequences that were not classified as Ortohepevirus A were removed, and the remaining sequences (n = 642) were reduced to 50 (by random selection, to reduce the filesize, see the file "script_to_identify_valid_genomes.R"). The sequences were aligned using the online version of mafft version 7 (https://mafft.cbrc.jp/alignment/server/, accessed January 19, 2021), using Auto settings.
