High prevalence of porcine Hokovirus in German wild boar populations

Cornelia Adlhoch,Marco Kaiser,Heinz Ellerbrok,Georg Pauli

doi:10.1186/1743-422x-7-171

Abstract

Porcine Hokovirus (PHoV) was recently discovered in Hong Kong. This new Parvovirus of pigs is closely related to the human Parvoviruses 4 and 5 (PARV4/5) and bovine Hokovirus (BHoV). So far, nothing is known about the presence and prevalence of PHoV in regions of the world other than Hong Kong. A study was initiated to investigate PHoV in German wild boars from five different geographical regions, using a newly established quantitative real-time PCR assay. Analysis of collected liver and serum samples revealed high overall prevalence (32.7%; 51/156) of PHoV in wild boars. The prevalence differed between the regions and increased with age. Two near full-length genomes and a large fragment for three additional isolates from different regions were sequenced and used for phylogenetic analysis. The German PHoV sequences from wild boars showed a close relationship with sequences of isolates from Hong Kong.

Highlights

Porcine Hokovirus (PHoV) was recently discovered in Hong Kong
One of several novel animal parvoviruses is the porcine Hokovirus (PHoV), a putative member of the genus Parvovirus within the family of Parvoviridae. This new parvovirus PHoV has been described in pigs from Hong Kong [1]
Related human Parvoviruses PARV 4 and PARV5 were detected in various samples from healthy and diseased individuals [2,3,4,5]

Summary

Introduction

Porcine Hokovirus (PHoV) was recently discovered in Hong Kong. This new Parvovirus of pigs is closely related to the human Parvoviruses 4 and 5 (PARV4/5) and bovine Hokovirus (BHoV). Serum and bile samples from a total of 156 wild boars were tested for the presence of PHoV genomes. A quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) assay using the PHoV_TM 5’ nuclease probe (TaqMan® probe) in combination with 3 primers PHoV_F/PHoV_R/HPV_R (Table 1; TIB MOLBIOL, Berlin, Germany) was applied in this study to determine the copy numbers of PHoV genomes.

Results

Conclusion