Complete genome determination of a European Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus (BmNPV) strain isolated in the French Cevennes

Abstract

The Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus (BmNPV) is a critical pathogen in sericulture; yet, it also holds great promise for the bioproduction of recombinant proteins. Here, we report the characterization of a highly pathogenic strain from the French Cevennes region. Phylogenetic analyses reveal that this strain is related to a Brazilian BmNPV strain.

Keywords: Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus; baculovirus; silkworm.

Fig 1

Comparison of BmNPV-FR-Cev with other sequenced BmNPV strains. (A) Phylogenetic tree obtained on an alignment of 47 core genes representing a total of 42,595 nucleotides using FastTree. BmNPV-FR-Cev is marked with a star, numbers represent FastTree local branch support. For each strain, the country of isolation (when available) and its GenBank accession number are indicated. (B) Comparison of genome composition and protein identity with 10 sequenced BmNPV strains. Predicted genes in BmNPV-FR-Cev are represented on the outer circle. Each of the 10 inner circles represents the comparison to each strain highlighted in (A), ordered from the phylogenetically closest on the outside to the most distant on the inside: Brazilian, C2, NPV.NC, Th18, India, Zhejiang, S1, Baoshan, Cubic, S2. Genes are colored according to the protein identity between BmNPV-FR-Cev and the compared strain, and genes not detected in the compared strains are left blank. The names of the core genes identified by Roary and used for (A) are indicated in bold.