Key result
Metagenomic allele calling covers ~56% of the ASFV genome, enabling rapid phylogenetic analysis without virus isolation.
Why the study?
Isolating African swine fever virus is time-consuming and requires biosafety laboratories, creating a need for rapid genome-wide phylogenetic analysis directly from metagenomic sequences.
A new allele-calling method allows rapid genome-wide phylogenetic analysis of ASFV directly from metagenomic sequences without needing virus isolation.
Answers are grounded in this paper and cite their sources.
Enables rapid ASFV phylogenetics from metagenomes without isolation; leaves open validation for field surveillance.
African swine fever virus (ASFV) has devastating impacts on swine health and the world economy. Rapid and accurate phylogenetic analysis of ASFV causing outbreaks is important to reveal diversity and evolutionary of ASFV. Because it is time-consuming and needs biosafety laboratories to isolate ASFV, here we present a new way to perform rapid genome-wide phylogenetic analysis of ASFV using an allele calling based on gene by gene approach directly from genome drafts assembled from metagenomic sequences. Using open-accessed chewBBACA software, 41 publicly available ASFV genomes were analyzed to optimize the parameters and find the alleles. Alleles as many as 94 were found for building the phylogenetic trees, which covered more than 56% of the whole genome. Based on the alleles, current ASFV isolates could be divided into two major clades and a few subclades. Then the method is used to analyze two ASFV genome drafts assembled from two metagenomic sequences of a swine whole blood and a swine spleen tissue collected in Wuhan, China. It shows that the two ASFV genomes showed highest similarity to that of Pig/HLJ/2018 strain and DB/LN/2018 strain, which isolated recently in China. This proved that the ASFV in Wuhan originate from the same source causing the earlier outbreaks in Helongjiang and Liaoning province of China. This method makes it possible to analyze phylogenetic analysis of ASFV draft genomes flexibly without the need of ASFV isolation. Furthermore, because it is based on Allele calling, the ASFV-specific genetic markers found could be translated into clinical diagnostics or can be used broadly to identify conserved putative therapeutic candidates.
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Xiong et al. (2019) studied African swine fever virus (ASFV) (n=43). Allele calling based on gene by gene approach was evaluated on Identification of alleles for phylogenetic trees. An allele calling approach directly from metagenomic sequences identified 94 alleles covering >56% of the ASFV genome, enabling rapid phylogenetic analysis without virus isolation.
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