Abstract
Kirkovirus (kirV), a seemingly novel virus family, has been found in horses and donkeys. The study’s objectives are to investigate the presence of the virus in swine. In this study, donkey-like kirV was detected in rectal swabs of piglets with diarrhea, and the positive rate was found to be 100% (149/149). However, this virus was detected in only one of 261 clinically healthy piglets, which suggested a strong relationship between the kirV and the diarrheic disease. We obtained the whole-genome sequences of three kirVs (Cj-D5, Cj-D32, and Cj-D43), with a length of 3750 nucleotides (nt) and sharing 99.9% nt identity with donkey kirVs. Furthermore, the three viruses shared 88.5–100% and 23–51% of the Rep protein sequence, similar to available reference strains of Kirkoviridae and Circoviridae, respectively. Moreover, like horse and donkey kirVs, the RCR domain and P-loop NTPase domains of Rep protein and nonanucleotide motif (CAATATTAC) of the three viruses were similar to those of Circoviruses and Cycloviruses. Phylogenetic analysis showed that these viruses could be grouped with members in the proposed family Kirkoviridae. This is the first report to describe that kirV can circulate in piglets with diarrhea, and future studies are needed to determine the pathogenesis of this virus.
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Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article and its additional files. Sequences of three porcine kirV strains generated in this study have been submitted to GenBank under accession nos. MW504209-MW504211.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32060808) and the Natural Science Foundation of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (2022D01A167).
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Conceptualization, J.X; Funding acquisition, J.X. and P.T.; Investigation, P.T., Y.D., X.S. and L.K.; Methodology, J.P. and J.Xie.; Project administration, J.Xie.; Resources, Z.W., G.S. and L.K.; Software, P.T. and L.Z.; Writing – original draft, P.T., G.L. and J.X.; Writing – review & editing, J.X.
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The authors declare no conflict of interest to be disclosed for the present study.
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All experimental procedures involving animals were approved by the Animal Care and Use Committee of Xinjiang Agricultural University, Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, under animal protocol number: 2020012, and performed according to the Animal Ethics Procedures and Guidelines of the Ministry of Agriculture of China.
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Tong, P., Wang, Z., Dang, Y. et al. Donkey-like kirkovirus is associated with diarrhea in piglets. Virus Genes (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11262-024-02066-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11262-024-02066-7