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Novel putative Bluetongue virus in healthy goats from Sardinia, Italy

2017; Elsevier BV; Volume: 51; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.meegid.2017.03.021

1567-7257

Giovanni Savini, Giantonella Puggioni, Giorgio Meloni, Maurilia Marcacci, Marco Di Domenico, Angela Maria Rocchigiani, Massimo Spedicato, Annalisa Oggiano, Daniela Manunta, Liana Teodori, Alessandra Leone, Ottavio Portanti, Francesca Cito, Annamaria Conte, Massimiliano Orsini, Cesare Cammà, Paolo Calistri, Armando Giovannini, Alessio Lorusso,

Viral Infections and Vectors

In recent years, novel Bluetongue virus (BTV) serotypes have been isolated and/or sequenced by researchers within the field. During Bluetongue surveillance activities, we identified a putative novel BTV serotype in healthy goats from Sardinia, Italy. RNAs purified from blood and serum samples were positive for BTV by a generic real time RT-PCR and c-ELISA, respectively, whereas genotyping and serotyping were unsuccessful. By NGS, the whole genome sequence was obtained from two blood samples (BTV-X ITL2015 strains 34200 and 33531). Overall, Seg 2 of BTV-X ITL2015 shows the highest identity (75.3-75.5% nt/77.4-78.1% aa) with recently isolated BTV-27s from Corsica and with the last discovered BTV XJ1407 from China (75.9% nt /78.2% aa), whereas it is less related with BTV-25 from Switzerland (73.0% nt/75.0% aa) and BTV-26 from Kuwait (62.0% nt/60.5% aa). A specific RT-qPCR targeting Seg 2 of BTV-X ITL2015 was assessed in this study. Considering the Seg 2/VP2 identity of BTV-X ITL2015 with BTV-25, 26, 27s and BTV XJ1407 and that serum of BTV-X ITL2015 infected goats failed to neutralize all tested extant serotypes, we propose the existence of a novel BTV serotype circulating in goats in Sardinia. Isolation was so far unsuccessful thus hampering proper antigenic characterization.