Since 2017, a serious infectious disease characterized by visceral gout has emerged in China's main goose-producing regions. The disease has caused huge economic losses to China's goose industry. In our previous study, we determined that the pathogen causing gout in goslings is a novel goose-origin astrovirus, designated as AStV/SDPY/Goose/1116/17 (AStV-SDPY) strain. To investigate the effect of host age on the outcome of novel goose-origin astrovirus infection, 200 1-day-old healthy goslings were selected to be experimentally infected at 1, 5, 15, 25, and 35 D of age. It was shown in experimental infection that the AStV-SDPY strain was highly pathogenic in goslings aged 1 to 15 D, causing growth repression, severe visceral urate deposition, and even death, whereas goslings infected at 25 and 35 D of age showed mild symptoms. Histopathologic examination indicated that lesions occurred mainly in the kidney and liver of infected goslings, which is correlated to the severity of clinical signs and gross lesions. Viral RNA was detected in all representative tissues, and virus shedding was detected continuously within 15 D after inoculation. Higher viral copy number, especially in vital organs such as the liver and kidney, was developed in the goslings infected at 1 to 15 D of age than older geese. In addition, clinical chemistry and inflammatory cytokines showed that younger geese are more sensitive to AStV infection. Overall, our study demonstrates that the pathogenicity of AStV-SDPY in goslings is partly associated with the age of infection, laying a foundation for further study of the pathogenic mechanism of this virus.

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Fowl adenovirus (FAdV) has posed a grave threat to the health of poultry and the sudden outbreak highlights the importance of the new rapid diagnostic method for the control and prevention of transmission. Hence, in the present study, a novel recombinase polymerase amplification (RPA) assay, which was suitable for all 12 serotypes (FAdV-1 to 8a and 8b to 11) had been successfully launched to detect FAdV. Also, the entire amplification process could be completed in the isothermal condition when temperature ranged from 26 to 42 °C within no more than 14 min, which was remarkably superior to end-point polymerase chain reaction (PCR, 98 min) with the same detecting sensitivity (as low as 0.1 fg viral DNA), avoiding sophisticated thermal cyclers with simple operation. Additionally, the same primers did not produce positive reactions with other viruses tested, demonstrating that the specificity of the RPA assay was acceptable. Moreover, this developed method could be efficiently used in the diagnosis of FAdV references and epidemic strains from different avian origins, thus making it a rapid, reliable and point-of-care FAdV diagnostics tool, as well as an alternative to end-point PCR.