Background: Since early 2015, mule duck and Cherry Valley duck flocks have been suffering from short beak and dwarfism syndrome. This widely spreading infectious disease is characterized by growth retardation, smaller beak and tarsus with high morbidity and low mortality rate. For better understanding, we identified and characterized virus isolates named AH and GD from diseased Cherry Valley duck and mule duck flocks and investigated the damage caused by novel parvovirus-related virus (NGPV) to tissues and organs, including kidney, brain, pancreas, liver, spleen, bursa of fabricius and myocardial tissues.
Results: AH and GD isolates shared high nucleotide identity with goose parvovirus (GPV). Alignment studies of AH and GD isolates showed 94.5-99.2% identity with novel parvovirus-related virus (NGPV), 98.7-91.5% identity with GPV and 79.9-83.7% with muscovy duck parvovirus (MDPV). Compared with other NGPV, classical GPV and MDPV sequences, a four 14-nucleotide-pair insertion in GD isolate was found in left open reading frame (ORF) (87-100 nt and 350-363 nt) and in right ORF (4847-4861 nt and 5122-5135 nt). However, in AH isolate, a five 14-nucleotide-pair deletions similar to other NGPV were found. The complete genome sequence comparison of eleven NGPV isolates from mule ducks and cherry valley ducks revealed no remarkable difference between them. Notably, the myocardium and bursa of fabricius of both disease and healthy animals are perfectly normal while other tissues have inflammatory cells exudation.
Conclusions: The AH and GD strains are novel parvovirus-related virus that isolates from mule ducks or cherry valley ducks which DNA sequence has no remarkable difference. The histopathology of tissues and organs such as kidney, brain etc. revealed non-significant changes in experimental and control animals. Overall, this study has contributed better understanding of molecular biology of NGPV strains and will help to develop the candidate strain for vaccine preparation to get better protection against these viral infections.
Keywords: Cherry valley duck; Mule duck; Novel parvovirus-related virus; Phylogenetic analysis.