Molecular detection and characterization of beak and feather disease virus in psittacine birds in Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Beak and feather disease virus (BFDV), a member of genus circovirus, is a small, non-enveloped, single stranded DNA virus. Although BFDVs are among the most well studied circoviruses, there is little to no information about BFDVs in Iran. The aim of the present study was to detect and identify BFDV molecules from the birds referred to the avian clinic of The Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Tehran University, Iran. A total of 55 DNA samples were extracted from birds from nine different species of the order psittaciformes. A robust conventional polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was applied to detect the rep gene of the virus. Ten out of 55 samples, from four different species, were tested positive for BFDVs in PCR (Melopsittacus undulates (4), Psittacula Krameri (3), Psittacus erithacus (2), Platycercus eximius (1)). Molecular identification of the detected BFDVs was performed based on their rep gene sequences. The phylogenetic analysis revealed that the Iranian BFDVs from this study were clustered into four genetically distinct clades belonging to different genetic subtypes of BFDVs (L1, N1, T1, and I4). Although the relation between the samples and their related subtypes in the tree are discussed, further studies are needed to elucidate the host specificity and incidence of the BFDVs from different genetic subtypes.

Keywords: Beak and feather disease virus; Molecular detection; Psittaciformes.

Fig. 1

Neighbour-joining tree of rep gene partial sequences of different BFDV strains. The Iranian BFDVs (IR) are marked with a black square and named according to the scheme: ‘BFDV’-MH-IR-‘B’-Rep-‘C’, where ‘BFDV’ denotes the species of the circovirus, ‘MH’ refers to the name of the author (Mohammadreza Haddadmarandi), the two later letters indicate the country of origin (Iran), the ‘B’ denotes the sample number, the Rep shows the replication part of circoviral genome and the last part shows the year of isolation, (GenBank accession number) and host species. The other isolates are represented by the name of the strain-subtype, country, and year of isolation (GenBank accession number) of the host species. To avoid complexity, the figure only presents the nearest sequences to ours among 27 strains of BFDV based on Varsani et al. (2011) and Julian et al. (2013)