Molecular Epidemiological Of Porcine Astrovirus In Hunan Province

Astrovirus is a zoonotic pathogen, mainly infecting birds and mammals. Astrovirus can cause major intestinal symptoms in animals and hepatitis in some birds. The cases caused by astrovirus and epidemiologic investigation of it have been reported worldwidely. Astrovirus often coinfects with other enteric viruses, like rotavirus, coronavirus and other pathogens, resulting in acute gastroenteritis in infants and young animals. In this study we developed a single PCR and a multiplex PCR for detecting porcine astrovirus ?PAstV? type 1,2,4 and 5, which provided simple, effective and convenient approaches for detecting PAstVs, and with these methods we have investigated the prevalence of PAstVs in pig herds from Hunan province.218 samples were tested, which were collected from 33 pig farms from 9 counties of Hunan province. All of the 9 counties were PAstV positive, and 81.8%?27/33? of the pig farms are PAstV positive. Specifically,46.3% ?101/218? of the samples are PAstV positive, with PAstV5 to be the most prevalent type with positive rate of 27.1%. Moreover, the prevalence of PAstV4, PAstV 1 and PAstV2 were 16.1%,14.2% and 10.1%, respectively. In this study, for the first time, PAstV4 and PAstV5 were detected in China, and PAstV 1 and PAstV2 were detected in Hunan province.Some of the positive samples were selected for sequencing, and the sequence analysis revealed that PAstV 1, PAstV2, PAstV4 and PAstV5 showed the highest identity to Japanese strain AB037272, American strain JF713710, American strain NC₀23675 and Canadian strain JN088537, respectively.