Farmscape for December 31, 2021

Research funded by the Swine Health Information Center is expected to lead to improved diagnostic tools for Porcine Sapelovirus.
Porcine Sapelovirus is an RNA virus and, as such, has enhanced opportunities for shifting as it replicates so, while most strains will be asymptomatic, others have been associated with respiratory disease, different diarrheas, reproductive issues and even impacts on the central nervous system.
Swine Health Information Center Executive Director Dr. Paul Sundberg says researchers with Kansas State University and the University of Illinois have characterised an emerging strain of PSV.

Clip-Dr. Paul Sundberg-Swine Health Information Center:
What we did was work on trying to do that genetic characterisation of the full Sapelovirus genome.
That's a really important step because when you can look at different pieces of genome it's kind of like feeling different pieces of the elephant.
You don't get the big picture.
So, what we tried to do was get the full-length genome sequence done by next generation sequencing and that was successful and that led us to the epidemiology of this particular virus strain at least in that it looks like it's related to two different Japanese strains but it also has characteristics of U.S. strains as we know it here.
All of those things lead us to being able to help with good diagnostics and being able to develop good PCRs and especially good ELISAs, good tests for antibodies.
Those are the kinds of tools that we need to be able to analyse the epidemiology of this virus and really to talk about the clinical syndromes in an informative manner such that we can talk about the epidemiology and the way the virus moves, the effect it has and its production effects all at the same time.

Full details of this work can be found on the Swine Health Information Center web site at swinehealth.org.
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Bruce Cochrane.

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