Isolation, Identification And Biological Characteristics Of Goat Poxvirus

In this study, a field strain of goat poxvirus (GPV) was isolated, and the biological characteristics of the isolated virus were studied, by cell culture, fluorescent identification, animal tests, morphological observation and sequence analysis. The obvious lesions of new born lamb spermary cell were observed in the second day after the inoculation of virus suspending. The indirect fluorescent assay (IFA) results showed that the virus can react to standard positive serum of goat pox. No clinical signs were observed after the mice, rabbits, cavies inoculated with virus suspending. But the typical clinical symptom and pathological changes of goat poxvirus infection appeared in the tenth day after the three-month goat inoculated with virus suspending. The pathological changes of chicken embryos were not observed after inoculation. The virus showed typical morphological shape of goat poxvirus under electron microscope. P32 gene of GPV was cloned into pMD18-T vector and then sequenced, compared with other P32 sequences of goat poxviruses available in the GeneBank. The homology of nucleotide and deduced amino acid sequence between isolated virus and GPV vaccine strain were 99.6% and 99.4%, and with other GPV share 99.6% and 98.8-99.4% homology at nucleotide and amino acid level, respectively. The results above demonstrated that the isolated virus is GPV, whose biological characteristics were a little different from those of other reported GPV, the homology of nucleotide and deduced amino acid sequence of P32 is very high among all GPVs. The isolated virus was named goat poxvirus LiuJiang/2003 strain.