Molecular and phylogenetic analysis of full spike glycoprotein of local bovine coronavirus (BCoV) strains isolated from diseased cows
2Biological chemistry, Alexander Silberman institute of life sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Abstract:
Bovine coronavirus (BCoV), first discovered in 1972, belongs to the order Nidovirales, family Coronaviruses, within the genus Betacoronavirus. BCoV is an enveloped virus with a single‐stranded positive‐sense RNA genome that poses five major structural proteins: (S) spike glycoprotein, (M) membrane protein, (HE) hemagglutinin esterase glycoprotein, (E) small membrane protein, and (N) nucleocapsid phosphoprotein. BCoV is associated with three distinct clinical syndromes in cattle: (neonatal) calf diarrhea [(N)CD)], winter dysentery (WD) characterized by hemorrhagic diarrhea in adult cows, and respiratory infections in cattle of different ages. BCoV infection is initiated by attaching the viral spike glycoprotein to target tissues. Thus, spike protein is vital for BCoV pathogenesis. The assumption that genetic diversity observed in the spike protein of different BCoV isolates could explain differences seen in the above disease syndromes still needs to be determined. In this study, we isolated and characterized local BCoV strains associated with the different disease syndromes. We amplified and sequenced their full spike proteins and used this to perform sequence alignments and phylogenetic analysis. To our knowledge, this is the first report providing molecular data on the full spike protein of BCoV isolated from different disease syndromes in Israel.