Norovirus in captive lion cub (Panthera leo)

Abstract

African lions (Panthera leo) are susceptible to viral diseases of domestic carnivores, including feline calici-virus infection. We report the identification of a novel enteric calicivirus, genetically related to human noroviruses of genogroup IV, in a lion cub that died of severe hemorrhagic enteritis.

Figure 1

Genome organization of the lion norovirus (NoV) 387/06. A nucleotide identity plot of the genome of the lion NoV (from the 3′ end of open reading frame [ORF] 1 to the poly-A tail) was compared with the human genogroup IV.1 NoV, Fort Lauderdale/560/98/US (AF414426). The sequences were analyzed with Simplot software (http://sray.med.som.jhmi.edu/scroftware/simplot) by using a window size of 200 and step size of 20 with gap strip off and J-C correction on. The ORF1–ORF2 junction region is shown with the starting and stopping codons ATG and TGA underlined. The highly conserved domain S and the highly variable domains P1 and P2 of the capsid protein are also indicated.

Figure 2

Phylogenetic tree constructed on the full-length amino acid (aa) sequence of the capsid protein. The tree was constructed by using a selection of norovirus (NoV) strains representative of genogroups (GG) I to V. Phylogenetic reconstruction was carried out with the p-distance correction and the neighbor-joining method, supported with bootstrapping >1,000 replications. Distance analysis and phylogenetic inference were carried out using the Mega 3.0 software package (www.megasoftware.net). Strain classification follows the outlines of Wang et al. (7) and Zheng et al. (8); strain designation follows the outlines of Green et al. (9). Bo, bovine; DE, Germany; UK, United Kingdom; Hu, human; JP, Japan; US, United States; Mu, murine; NLD, the Netherlands; Po, porcine.