Full genome sequence of bovine alphaherpesvirus 2 (BoHV-2)

Abstract

We present the complete genome sequence of bovine alphaherpesvirus 2 (BoHV-2), a member of the family Herpesviridae, subfamily Alphaherpesvirinae, genus Simplexvirus. BoHV-2 is the causative agent of bovine ulcerative mammillitis (bovine herpes mammillitis) and pseudo-lumpy skin disease. The genomic architecture of BoHV-2 is typical of most simplexvirus genomes and congruent with that of human alphaherpesvirus 1 (HHV-1). The genome comprises a total of 131,245 base pairs and has an overall G+C content of 64.9 mol%. A total of 75 open reading frames are predicted. The gene repertoire of BoHV-2 is analogous to that of HHV-1, although the coding region of US12 is missing. A phylogenetic analysis supported BoHV-2 as a member of the genus Simplexvirus.

Fig. 1

Organization of the BoHV-2 genome, represented by strain C1Z FZR. The unique genomic regions U_L and U_S (blue arrows) are enclosed by tandem repeats T/IR_L and T/IR_S (yellow) and the ‘a’ sequence (black bar). Three replication initiation sites (origin of replication—ori) and 75 open reading frames (white arrows) have been annotated.

Fig. 2

Maximum-likelihood analysis of 43 alphaherpesviruses. The phylogenetic tree was calculated based on an alignment of the concatenated amino acid sequences of the products of the highly conserved herpesvirus core genes UL5, UL9, UL18, UL19, UL27-UL31 and UL33. Scutaviruses were used as an outgroup. Software: IQ-TREE (version 1.6.12; 50.000 ultrafast bootstrap replicates; optimal substitution model for each gene partition). The bar represents amino acid substitutions per site, and an asterisk indicates bootstrap support of 100%, while italic numbers indicate lower bootstrap support. Herpesviruses that are currently not classified at the species level by the ICTV are indicated by a hash symbol