Liver virome of a Little Corella (Cacatua sanguinea) reveals coinfection with a novel parvovirus and two beak and feather disease viruses

Abstract

Emerging diseases are acknowledged as a growing threat to wildlife, with the continued identification of pathogenic and potentially pathogenic viruses in avian species resulting from ongoing advances in molecular diagnostic techniques. Parvoviruses under the genus Chaphamaparvovirus (subfamily Hamaparvovirinae) are highly divergent. The detection and characterisation of parvoviruses in psittacine birds is limited. This study reports a novel parvovirus, tentatively named psittaciform chaphamaparvovirus 3 (PsChV‐3) under the genus Chaphamaparvovirus, identified in an Australian free‐ranging little corella (Cacatua sanguinea). The PsChV‐3 genome is 4277 bp in length and encompasses four predicted open‐reading frames, including two major genes, a nonstructural replicase gene (NS1), and a structural capsid gene (VP1). The NS1 and VP1 genes showed the closest amino acid identities of 78.8% and 69.7%, respectively, with a recently sequenced psittaciform chaphamaparvovirus 2 from Australian Neophema species grass parrots. In addition, the presence of two complete novel beak and feather disease (BFDV) genomes, 1993 and 1868 nt in length, respectively, were detected from the same bird. Both these BFDV genomes contained two bidirectional ORFs encoding the putative Rep and Cap proteins. Phylogenetic analysis showed that the sequenced novel BFDV genomes clustered in a distinct subclade with other BFDVs isolated from Australian cockatoos. This study contributes to the characterisation chaphamaparvoviruses and BFDV in Australian parrots and supports the need for ongoing monitoring and molecular studies into the avian virome in native Australian psittacine bird species.

Virome of Australia’s most endangered parrot in captivity evidenced of harboring hitherto unknown viruses

“…Annotation of the ORFs in the identities of viral genomes was completed by comparison against specific criteria (>30 AA, methionine start codon, <50% overlap of a gene) via NCBI’s database. The genome for all the detected circoviruses was annotated using Geneious software (version 2022.1.1, Biomatters, New Zealand), where representative circovirus genomes were used as reference guidelines ( 2 , 48 ). The identified ORFs were converted into FASTA files and compared for similarity using both NCBI’s BlastP and BlastX.…”