Identification and Molecular Characteristics Analysis of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea Virus Variants

To ascertain a diarrhea case in a pig farm in Shandong province,the pathological changes of dead piglets were observed and nested RT-PCR test was carried out on 7 diarrhea samples for porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV).Pathological examination revealed that intestine was detected as enlargement,hyperemia and edema.After histological examination,the typical microscopic lesions of intestine were disappearance of epithelial cells,villus shrinkage and shortening.The result of nested RT-PCR showed that all of the 7 samples could amplify a specific target band of PEDV.Molecular characteristics of two field strains showed that they had an amino acid homology of 92.3% to 92.4% with vaccine CV777 and 96.6% to 98.6% with other previous field strains which sequences were downloaded from GenBank.Phylogenetic tree analysis further revealed that all of PEDV strains could be mainly divided into two clusters of G1 and G2. G2 consisted of the field strains of our study and other field strains from USA,China and so on,which had the same sequence characteristics of two insertions and one deletion,while G1 consisted of all vaccines of CV777 and several older field strains from China and Korea.These results indicated that our field strains were the dominant strains in recent epidemic diarrhea occurrence.Moreover,its molecular characteristics might be a characterization of differentiating the field and vaccine strains.