Porcine Bocavirus: A 10-Year History since Its Discovery

Abstract

Porcine bocavirus (PBoV) is a single-stranded DNA virus, belongs to the genus Bocaparvovirus of family Parvoviridae. It was discovered along with porcine circovirus 2 (PCV 2) and torque tenovirus (TTV) in the lymph nodes of pigs suffering from postweaning multisystemic wasting syndrome (PMWS) in Sweden in 2009. PBoV has been reported throughout the world, mostly in weaning piglets, and has a broad range of tissue tropism. Since PBoV is prevalent in healthy as well as clinically infected pigs and is mostly associated with coinfection with other viruses, the pathogenic nature of PBoV is still unclear. Currently, there are no cell lines available for the study of PBoV, and animal model experiments have not been described. This review summarizes the current state of knowledge about PBoV, including the epidemiology, evolution analysis, detection methods, pathogenesis and public health concerns.

Keywords: Coinfection; Detection; Emerging pathogen; Epidemiology; Evolution; Pathogenesis; Porcine bocavirus (PBoV); Public health concerns.

Fig. 1

Major countries representing the identification of porcine bocavirus.

Fig. 2

The genome structure of porcine bocavirus. The genome of porcine bocavirus contains three ORF regions that encode four proteins. The sequences for VP1 and VP2 overlap in the genome.

Fig. 3

Phylogenetic analysis of bocaviruses. The phylogenetic tree was generated using full length nucleotide sequences from bocaviruses in GenBank using the MEGA 7 software package (neighbor joining method with 1000 bootstrap replicates). The relationship among the porcine bocaviruses from different countries can be observed from the tree. Detailed information related to certain PBoV strains is listed in Table 1.