“…Within the whole‐PRRSV genome, the specific region ORF5b, also known and herein identified as ORF5, encodes the virus envelope protein and has been extensively used in molecular epidemiology and evolutionary studies to characterize distinct isolates (Brar et al., 2015 ; Lambert et al., 2019 ; Larochelle et al., 2003 ; Paploski et al., 2019 ; Paploski et al., 2021 ; Shi et al., 2010 ; Trevisan et al., 2021b ; Wan et al., 2019b ). The ORF5 gene comprises 603 nucleotide base pairs (bp) for PRRSV‐2 and 606 bp for PRRSV‐1, representing approximately 4% of the whole PRRSV genome and has been primarily used in the Americas to classify PRRSV‐2 strains according to restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) patterns (Wesley et al., 1998 ) and genetic lineages (Lambert et al., 2019 ; Paploski et al., 2019 ; Paploski et al., 2021 ; Shi et al., 2010 ; Wang et al., 2019b ), and to charactherize PRRSV strains in diversity studies (Alkhamis et al., 2016 ; Arruda et al., 2017 ; Brar et al., 2015 ; Ramos et al., 2018 ; Ramírez et al., 2019 ; Trevisan et al., 2021b ). In U.S. veterinary diagnostic laboratories, sequencing of the PRRSV ORF5 region is performed using the Sanger technique (Sanger et al., 1977 ) which determines the consensus gene sequence in a sample and is not an efficient tool to sequence multiple viruses if more than one PRRSV strain is present (Harmon et al., 2019 ).…”