Enteric disease in dogs naturally infected by a novel canine astrovirus

Abstract

Infection by a novel canine astrovirus was associated with gastroenteritis in two dogs. The virus displayed 70.3 to 73.9% amino acid identity to other canine astroviruses in the full-length capsid. Specific antibodies were detected in the convalescent-phase sera of the dogs, indicating seroconversion. Also, the virus appeared weakly related antigenically to the prototype canine astrovirus isolate ITA/2008/Bari.

Fig 1

Phylogenetic tree displaying the relationships among mammalian AstVs. The tree was calculated on the full-length amino acid capsid alignment without removing the gaps, using the neighbor-joining method with the p-distance correction, with 1,000-replicate bootstrapping using the MEGA package version 4.0 (15). Bootstrap values lower than 75% are not shown. The canine AstV strain ITA/2010/Zoid is indicated with a solid circle. AstV species with assigned designation are indicated with the letter G followed by the roman number and a capital letter. Strains with no assigned designation are indicated with a G. Abbreviations: ca, canine; fe, feline; hu, human; po, porcine; bo, bovine.

Fig 2

Virus shedding and clinical scores in the two animals (dog A and dog B). Virus load is expressed as the logarithmic (log) value of the RNA copies/g of feces. The clinical scores were calculated by following the outlines of Decaro et al. (3), with minor modifications.