Recently, a novel atypical porcine pestivirus (APPV) with significant distribution was described in the USA. Subsequent screening of the German pig sector showed a high prevalence of APPV with high variability among strains. First indication of a cell culture isolate is provided which will allow further investigations like pathogenesis studies.

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Classical swine fever virus (CSFV) is the causative agent of a severe multi-systemic disease of pigs. While several aspects of virus-host-interaction are known, the early steps of infection remain unclear. For the closely related bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), a cellular receptor is known: bovine complement regulatory protein CD46. Given that these two pestiviruses are closely related, porcine CD46 is also a candidate receptor for CSFV. In addition to CD46, cell-culture-adapted CSFV strains have been shown to use heparan sulfates as an additional cellular factor. In the present study, the interaction of field-type and cell-culture-adapted CSFV with a permanent porcine cell line or primary macrophages was assessed using anti-porcine CD46 monoclonal antibodies and a heparan-sulfate-blocking compound, DSTP-27. The influence of receptor blocking was assessed using virus titration and quantitative PCR. Treatment of cells with monoclonal antibodies against porcine CD46 led to a reduction of viral growth in both cell types. The effect was most pronounced with field-type CSFV. The blocking could be enhanced by addition of DSTP-27, especially for cell-culture-adapted CSFV. The combined use of both blocking agents led to a significant reduction of viral growth but was also not able to abolish infection completely. The results obtained in this study showed that both porcine CD46 and heparan sulfates play a major role in the initial steps of CSFV infection. Additional receptors might also play a role for attachment and entry; however, their impact is obviously limited in vitro in comparison to CD46 and heparan sulfates.

RNA viruses have the highest known mutation rates. Consequently it is likely that a high proportion of individual RNA virus genomes, isolated from an infected host, will contain lethal mutations and be non-functional. This is problematic if the aim is to clone and investigate high-fitness, functional cDNAs and may also pose problems for sequence-based analysis of viral evolution. To address these challenges we have performed a study of the evolution of classical swine fever virus (CSFV) using deep sequencing and analysis of 84 full-length cDNA clones, each representing individual genomes from a moderately virulent isolate. In addition to here being used as a model for RNA viruses generally, CSFV has high socioeconomic importance and remains a threat to animal welfare and pig production. We find that the majority of the investigated genomes are non-functional and only 12% produced infectious RNA transcripts. Full length sequencing of cDNA clones and deep sequencing of the parental population identified substitutions important for the observed phenotypes. The investigated cDNA clones were furthermore used as the basis for inferring the sequence of functional viruses. Since each unique clone must necessarily be the descendant of a functional ancestor, we hypothesized that it should be possible to produce functional clones by reconstructing ancestral sequences. To test this we used phylogenetic methods to infer two ancestral sequences, which were then reconstructed as cDNA clones. Viruses rescued from the reconstructed cDNAs were tested in cell culture and pigs. Both reconstructed ancestral genomes proved functional, and displayed distinct phenotypes in vitro and in vivo. We suggest that reconstruction of ancestral viruses is a useful tool for experimental and computational investigations of virulence and viral evolution. Importantly, ancestral reconstruction can be done even on the basis of a set of sequences that all correspond to non-functional variants.

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