Abstract
Transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) is a coronavirus (CoV) that is a major pathogenity of viral enteritis and diarrhea in suckling piglets, causing high morbidity and mortality. In this study, a TGEV strain HQ2016 was isolated from northeast China and characterized its genome sequence and pathogenicity. The phylogenetic analysis indicated that the TGEV HQ2016 strain was more similar to the TGEV Purdue cluster than to the Miller cluster. Both recombination and phylogenetic analysis based on each structural and non-structural gene revealed no recombination event in the HQ2016 strain. Experimental infection study using colostrum-deprived newborn piglets successfully showed that the HQ2016 can cause clinical symptoms including anorexia and yellow-to-whitish watery diarrhea, which are characteristics of TGE, in the inoculated piglets 48 h post-inoculation. These results provide valuable information about the evolution of the porcine CoVs.
Highlights
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are the main etiological agents underlying outbreaks of porcine diarrhea, causing substantial economic losses [1]
Transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) is an enteropathic coronavirus that infects pigs, and was first reported in the USA in the 1940s, after which spread throughout the world [1,2,3]
Piglets showed the characteristic clinical symptoms of TGE from 12 h after TGEV HQ2016 inoculated until the end of the experiment
Summary
Coronaviruses (CoVs) are the main etiological agents underlying outbreaks of porcine diarrhea, causing substantial economic losses [1]. Transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV) is a member of the family Coronaviridae that was first reported in 1946 in the USA [2]. Epidemiological investigations have shown that TGEV is often present in the spring and autumn in the northeast of China, sometimes in mixed infections with other diarrhea virus, and caused viral enteritis and severe diarrhea in all ages of pigs, especially with high mortality in suckling piglets [9, 10]. We isolated a TGEV from clinical samples collected from farms in northeast China using PK15 cells, characterized its genome based on the whole-genome sequence, and investigated its pathogenicity in colostrum-deprived neonatal pigs in terms of a clinical assessment, viral shedding, virus distribution, histopathological changes, and a mortality analysis.
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