| The study was conducted to identify the unique variations in wild type and vaccine strain of ILTV genomes to obtain complete mutations within the entire genomes compared to a reference ILTV genome sequence ( Gallid herpesvirus 1, complete genome; GenBank accession number NC_006623). Genomes of one wild type and two vaccine ILTV strains were sequenced using Illumina Genome Analyzer 2X of 36 cycles of single-end read. Analysis of the ILTV genome sequences was carried out using a trial version of DNAStar software (including NGen, SeqMan Pro, Gen Vision), Blastx and Microsoft Excel. Results showed many amino acid differences distributed across the viral protein coding regions of the three ILTV genomes compared to the reference genome sequence. The sequence differences demonstrated the spectrum of variability among the wild type and vaccine strains. Moreover, the results also revealed 52 genes with complete conservation across the 3 strains. These data demonstrated the potential of high-throughput sequencing technology to yield insight of the sequence variation in different ILTV strains. This information can be used to discriminate between wild type and vaccine strains, or among vaccines strains, and further, to identify newly emerging mutant strains. The conserved coding sequences among various ILTV strains can be promising targets to discover a universal, safer vaccine against ILTV.;KEYWORDS: ILTV genome, Illumina sequencing, variation. |
