Detection and molecular characterization of a canine norovirus

Abstract

We identified a novel calicivirus in a pup with enteritis. The isolate was related genetically (90.1% aa identity in the capsid protein) to a lion norovirus strain.

Figure 1

Genome organization of the canine norovirus GIV.2/Bari/170/07/ITA. The genome (from the 3′ end of open reading frame 1 [ORF1] to the poly-A tail) of the canine strain and of the human GGIV.1 norovirus, Fort Lauderdale/560/98/US (AF414426) was plotted against the genome of the strain lion/GGIV.2/Pistoia/387/06/ITA (EF450827). Sequences were analyzed with Simplot (11) by using a window size of 200 nt and step size of 20 nt with gap strip off and Hamming correction on. The conserved shell (S) domain and the variable regions (P1 and P2) are also indicated.

Figure 2

Phylogenetic tree constructed on the full-length amino acid sequence of the capsid protein. The tree was constructed by using a selection of norovirus (NoV) strains representative of the genogroups I to V. Phylogenetic analysis (neighbor-joining) with bootstrap analysis (1,000 replicates) and Kimura 2-parameter correction was conducted by using the MEGA software package version 3.0 (14). Strains designation follows the outlines of Wang et al. (10) and Zheng et al. (13). Bo, bovine; po, porcine; mu, murine; hu, human; ca canine.