[Molecular characterization of a porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus isolate NT0801 from China].

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV) is one of the important pathogens causing serious economic losses to swine industry worldwide. PRRSV is genetically and pathologically heterogenous. PRRSV NT0801 strain was isolated in a pig farm with clinical signs and had high pathogenesis in piglets. But its NSP2 gene did not have 30 amino acids deletion as highly pathogenic JXA1 strain. To elucidate the genetic characteristics of PRRSV NT0801 strain, the full-length genome of NT0801 isolate was sequenced and analyzed. The results showed that the genome of PRRSV NT0801 was 15439bp in length, including 29nt Poly(A) tail. Compared with the highly pathogenic JXA1 strain, it had the nucleotide sequence identity of 96.7%, amino acid sequence homology of 97.2% and 98.5% in GP3 and GP5, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that NT0801 isolate was located between the traditional strain and the highly pathogenic strain. But no obvious recombination signal was observed, compared with other PRRSV isolates with different virulence. The alignment of amino acid sequence of NT0801 with other PRRSV isolates demonstrated that three out of nine sites, being consistent with the highly pathogenic strain, were different from those in highly pathogenic while same as those in traditional strains and JXA1 vaccine strain. And one out of 9 sites was same as that of JXA1 vaccine strain exclusively, two out of 9 sites were different from all the strains. These results indicated that PRRSV NT0801 strain is closely related to highly pathogenic PRRSV, although there has no 30 amino acids deletions in NSP2 region. The epidemic PRRSV strains variation results from the gene mutation. It should be useful for studying on the virulence genes located in different ORFs of PRRSV in the future.