Abstract
Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) causes Enzootic Bovine Leukosis (EBL), a persistent life-long disease resulting in immune dysfunction and shortened lifespan in infected cattle, severely impacting the profitability of the US dairy industry. Our group has found that 94% of dairy farms in the United States are infected with BLV with an average in-herd prevalence of 46%. This is partly due to the lack of clinical presentation during the early stages of primary infection and the elusive nature of BLV transmission. This study sought to validate a near-complete genomic sequencing approach for reliability and accuracy before determining its efficacy in characterizing the sequence identity of BLV proviral genomes collected from a pilot study made up of 14 animals from one commercial dairy herd. These BLV-infected animals were comprised of seven adult dam/daughter pairs that tested positive by ELISA and qPCR. The results demonstrate sequence identity or divergence of the BLV genome from the same samples tested in two independent laboratories, suggesting both vertical and horizontal transmission in this dairy herd. This study supports the use of Oxford Nanopore sequencing for the identification of viral SNPs that can be used for retrospective genetic contact tracing of BLV transmission.
Highlights
Enzootic bovine leukosis (EBL) is a disease caused by the retrovirus bovine leukemia virus (BVL) and is a major economic detriment to the U.S dairy industry
Bovine leukemia virus (BLV) pathogenesis compromises the host’s immune system, leaving the cows susceptible to several other opportunistic pathogens, all of which might serve as a potential disease reservoir within the herd and shorten the lifespan and productivity of the cows
This study successfully utilized a bioinformatics pipeline, which included Longshot, to call single nucleotide variants with high accuracy using whole-genome Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) data and assemble near complete BLV proviral consensus genomes from field-collected samples
Summary
Enzootic bovine leukosis (EBL) is a disease caused by the retrovirus bovine leukemia virus (BVL) and is a major economic detriment to the U.S dairy industry. Most infected cattle remain asymptomatic but approximately 30% develop persistent lymphocytosis and elevated number of B-cells, while 5% of them develop B-cell leukemia/lymphosarcoma [1]. BLV pathogenesis compromises the host’s immune system, leaving the cows susceptible to several other opportunistic pathogens, all of which might serve as a potential disease reservoir within the herd and shorten the lifespan and productivity of the cows. Our group has found that 46% of dairy cows in 94% of dairy farms in the United States are infected with BLV [2], which is consistent with the reports from USDA
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