Abstract
Aleutian mink disease virus (AMDV) readily spread within farmed mink and causes chronic infections with significant impacts for welfare and economy. In the present study a currently circulating Danish AMDV strain was used to induce chronic experimental infection of farmed mink.PCR was used to detect viral DNA in full blood, organs, faeces and oro-nasal swabs weekly for the first 8 weeks and then biweekly for another 16 weeks after AMDV challenge inoculation of wild type mink. The mink (n=29) was infected and seroconverted 2–3 weeks after AMDV inoculation and AMDV antibodies persisted during the maximum experimental period of 24 weeks. Viraemia and faecal excretion of viral DNA was detected in the mink (n=29) at various and intermittent time intervals. Excretion of viral DNA in oro-nasal swabs was detected for 1–8 weeks in 21 mink. This highlights the risk of transmitting AMDV between infected farms.PCR was successfully used to detect viral DNA in organs 8, 16 and 24 weeks after AMDV inoculation with only minor differences between these weeks which is of diagnostic interest.This AMDV challenge model was also used to mimic natural infection of susceptible sapphire mink. Four of 6 sapphire mink were infected indirectly via the AMDV inoculated wild type mink whereas the other 2 sapphire mink remained uninfected.
Highlights
Astroviruses are non-enveloped viruses belonging to the Astroviridae family [1]
This polyprotein is a precursor of the non-structural proteins that are generated from post-translational processing by viral encoded and cellular proteases [16,17]
We have focused on development of a reliable source of recombinant capsid proteins through the establishment of stable transfected mink fetal and BHK-21 cells constitutively expressing ORF2 forms of two genetically distinct mink astroviruses, and performed primary challenge experiments with two of the proteins
Summary
Astroviruses are non-enveloped viruses belonging to the Astroviridae family [1] Members of this family infect the gastrointestinal tract of mammals and birds and are responsible for a large proportion of non-bacterial diarrhea, in infants and elderly people, and in newborn of a wide range of animal species [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]. The genome of astroviruses is 6.4–7.3 kb in size, and is positivesense, single-stranded polyadenylated RNA It contains three open reading frames (ORFs), flanked by 59 and 39 untranslated regions [15]. ORF1a encodes non-structural proteins, ORF1b codes for the replicase, and they are translated into a polyprotein through a ribosomal frameshift mechanism [15]. The size of the ORF2 product varies from 671–816 amino acids in different host species and astrovirus strains [19], and has a molecular mass of approximately 72 to 90 kDa [6,15,20]
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