The S protein of a novel recombinant PEDV strain promotes the infectivity and pathogenicity of PEDV in mid‐west China

Porcine epidemic diarrhoea virus (PEDV) is an emerging and re-emerging swine enterovirus that causes highly contagious diarrhoea and mortality in piglets. To better understand the current prevalence of PEDV in mid-west China, and to find out the reason for the re-emergence of PEDV from the viral genomic characteristics. Herein, we firstly investigated epidemiology of PEDV in mid-west China from 2019 to 2020. A total of 62.23% (257/413) of diarrhoea samples were positive for PEDV, and the PEDV-positive cases were mainly detected in winter. Then, we selected the SXSL strain as a representative strain to study the genetic and pathogenic characterization of PEDV pandemic strains in mid-west China. The recombination analysis showed that SXSL strain was a recombinant strain, and the major and minor parent strains of the recombination are CH/SCZJ/2018 strain and GDS48 strain, respectively. Complete genome sequencing and homology analysis showed that the S protein of SXSL strain contained multiple amino acid indels and mutations compared to the PEDV representative strains. Furthermore, we evaluated the effect of S protein on the infectivity and pathogenicity of PEDV by the PEDV reverse genetics system, and results showed that SXSL S protein increased the infectivity and pathogenicity of chimeric virus. Overall, our findings provided important information for understanding the roles of S protein in the prevalence of PEDV in mid-west China and developing vaccines based on PEDV pandemic strains.