Abstract
BackgroundCoronaviruses are notorious pathogens that cause diarrheic and respiratory diseases in humans and animals. Although the epidemiology and pathogenicity of coronaviruses have gained substantial attention, little is known about bovine coronavirus in cattle, which possesses a close relationship with human coronavirus. Bovine torovirus (BToV) is a newly identified relevant pathogen associated with cattle diarrhoea and respiratory diseases, and its epidemiology in the Chinese cattle industry remains unknown.ResultsIn this study, a total of 461 diarrhoeic faecal samples were collected from 38 different farms in three intensive cattle farming regions and analysed. Our results demonstrated that BToV is present in China, with a low prevalence rate of 1.74% (8/461). The full-length spike genes were further cloned from eight clinical samples (five farms in Henan Province). Phylogenetic analysis showed that two different subclades of BToV strains are circulating in China. Meanwhile, the three BToV strains identified from dairy calves, 18,307, 2YY and 5YY, all contained the amino acid variants R614Q, I801T, N841S and Q885E.ConclusionsThis is the first report to confirm the presence of BToV in beef and dairy calves in China with diarrhea, which extend our understanding of the epidemiology of BToVs worldwide.
Highlights
Coronaviruses are notorious pathogens that cause diarrheic and respiratory diseases in humans and animals
These data strongly suggest that Bovine torovirus (BToV) is relevant to diarrhoea in cattle, to our knowledge, there have been no reports of BToV in China to date
BToV detection and coinfections A total of 461 faecal samples from calves with clinical signs of diarrhoea were detected by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR), and the results demonstrated that 1.74% (8/461) of the diarrhoeal samples were positive for BToV
Summary
Coronaviruses are notorious pathogens that cause diarrheic and respiratory diseases in humans and animals. Bovine torovirus (BToV) is a newly identified relevant pathogen associated with cattle diarrhoea and respiratory diseases, and its epidemiology in the Chinese cattle industry remains unknown. BToV has been reported in France, South Africa, Costa Rica, Canada, Venezuela, Hungary, Austria, Japan, South Korea, Brazil and, in recent years, Turkey and Croatia, which suggests that it has become a worldwide problem [4, 12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] It is associated with respiratory and gastrointestinal diseases. This report is the first to describe the presence of BToV in Chinese beef and dairy, and to analyse the genetic characteristics and phylogenetic relationships between the Chinese BToV, BToV reference strains and other representative toroviruses
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