Dynamic Alterations of Gut Microbiota in Porcine Circovirus Type 3-Infected Piglets.

Lei Hou,Li Wei,Haijun Jiang,Rong Quan,Wei Zhang,Jue Liu,Shanshan Zhu,Dan Wang,Jing Wang

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.01360

Abstract

Porcine circovirus type 3 (PCV3) is a novel porcine circovirus species associated with several diseases such as porcine dermatitis and nephropathy syndrome (PDNS)-like clinical signs, reproductive failure, cardiac pathologies, and multisystemic inflammation in piglets and sows. Currently, many studies have focused on the interaction between microbiota composition and disease progression. However, dynamic changes in the composition of the gut microbiota following PCV3 infection are still unknown. In this study, alterations in gut microbiota in PCV3-inoculated and sham-inoculated piglets were analyzed at various time points [7, 14, 21, and 28 days post-inoculation (dpi)] using the Illumina MiSeq platform. Using principal coordinate analysis, obvious structural segregations were observed in bacterial diversity and richness between PCV3- and sham-inoculated piglets, as well as at the four different time points. The abundance of gut microbiota exhibited a remarkable time-related decrease in Clostridium_sensu_stricto_1 in PCV3-inoculated piglets. In addition, significant differences were observed in functional classification based on cluster of orthologous groups assignment, between PCV3- and sham-inoculated piglets. Our findings demonstrated that PCV3 infection caused dynamic changes in the gut microbiota community. Therefore, regulating gut microbiota community may be an effective approach for preventing PCV3 infection.

Highlights

Porcine circoviruses (PCVs), belonging to the genus Circovirus within the Circoviridae family, are the smallest non-enveloped autonomously replicating DNA viruses with a single-stranded, circular genome (Rosario et al, 2017)
Serum samples were collected from each piglet in the two groups at 7, 14, 21, and 28 dpi and were assayed for Porcine circovirus type 3 (PCV3) loads by absolute quantitative real-time PCR
The results showed that low diversity in gut microbiota and peak levels of PCV3 DNA are observed only at 21 dpi, indicating that PCV3 replication had the greatest influence on the gut microbiota, so our further experiments and analysis mainly focused on this time point

Summary

Introduction

Porcine circoviruses (PCVs), belonging to the genus Circovirus within the Circoviridae family, are the smallest non-enveloped autonomously replicating DNA viruses with a single-stranded, circular genome (Rosario et al, 2017). Retrospective studies have shown that PCV3 is highly homologous to bat-associated circovirus and that the first case of PCV3 infection occurred in 1966 in China (Fux et al, 2018). Recent studies have shown that dogs and cattle could be infected with PCV3 (Zhang et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2019), indicating that PCV3 possesses an ability of cross-species transmission and circulation among a broad range of non-porcine hosts, which may pose a severe threat to the pig industry and to other animals as well

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