Isolation and identification of a bovine viral diarrhea virus from sika deer in china

Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) infections continue to cause significantly losses in the deer population. Better isolation and identification of BVDV from sika deer may contribute significantly to the development of prophylactic therapeutic, and diagnostic reagents as well as help in prevention and control of BVDV. However, isolation and identification of BVDV from sika deer is seldom reported in literature. In this study, we collected some samples according to clinical sign of BVDV to isolation and identification of BVDV from sika deer. Results we isolated a suspected BVDV strain from livers of an aborted fetus from sika deer in Changchun (China) using MDBK cell lines, named as CCSYD strain, and identified it by cytopathic effect (CPE), indirect immunoperoxidase test (IPX) and electron microscopy(EM). The results indicated that this virus was BVDV by a series of identification. The structural proteins E0 gene was cloned and sequenced. The obtained E0 gene sequence has been submitted to GenBank with the accession number: FJ555203 . Alignment with other 9 strains of BVDV, 7 strains of classical swine fever virus (CSFV) and 3 strains of border disease virus(BDV) in the world, showed that the homology were 98.6%-84.8%, 76.0%-74.7%, 76.6%-77.0% for nucleotide sequence, respectively. The phylogenetic analysis indicated that new isolation and identification CCSYD strain belonged to BVDV1b. Conclusion To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report that BVDV was isolated and identified in sika deer. This current research contributes development new BVDV vaccine to prevent and control of BVD in sika deer.