Susceptibility of Chickens to Porcine Deltacoronavirus Infection

Abstract

Porcine deltacoronavirus (PDCoV) is a novel swine enteropathogenic coronavirus with worldwide distribution. PDCoV belongs to the Deltacoronavirus (DCoV) genus, which mainly includes avian coronaviruses (CoVs). PDCoV has the potential to infect human and chicken cells in vitro, and also has limited infectivity in calves. However, the origin of PDCoV in pigs, the host range, and cross-species infection of PDCoV still remain unclear. To determine whether PDCoV really has the ability to infect chickens in vivo, the three lines of chicken embryos and specific pathogen free (SPF) chickens were inoculated with PDCoV HNZK-02 strain to investigate PDCoV infection in the current study. Our results indicated that PDCoV can infect chicken embryos and could be continuously passaged on them. Furthermore, we observed that PDCoV-inoculated chickens showed mild diarrhea symptoms and low fecal viral RNA shedding. PDCoV RNA could also be detected in multiple organs (lung, kidney, jejunum, cecum, and rectum) and intestinal contents of PDCoV-inoculated chickens until 17 day post-inoculation by real-time quantitative PCR (qRT-PCR). A histology analysis indicated that PDCoV caused mild lesions in the lung, kidney, and intestinal tissues. These results prove the susceptibility of chickens to PDCoV infection, which might provide more insight about the cross-species transmission of PDCoV.

Porcine Deltacoronavirus Infection and Transmission in Poultry, United States1

“…Pig infection dynamics have demonstrated a similar serum Recent studies demonstrated that PDCoV can infect and kill cells of other species through APN receptors (19,35). PDCoV has been reported to infect commercial chickens in vivo (36). The differences in susceptibility to PDCoV infection between chicks and poults we observed could be related to differences in APN expression levels between the species.…”

Trypsin promotes porcine deltacoronavirus mediating cell-to-cell fusion in a cell type-dependent manner

“…Importantly, porcine aminopeptidase N (pAPN) has been reported to serve as a functional receptor for PDCoV in two recent studies [24,25], and the virus may engage APN from diverse species to facilitate its interspecies transmission [25]. Recently, PDCoV has been reported to successfully infect chickens and calves [26,27]. Thus, PDCoV must be studied more extensively to better understand its emergence, lifecycle, evolution and pathogenesis in order to facilitate future control of the virus.…”

Porcine deltacoronavirus (PDCoV) modulates calcium influx to favor viral replication

“…Subsequently, PDCoV was identified in South Korea, Canada, Mainland China, Thailand, Lao People's Democratic Republic and Vietnam (Lee and Lee, 2014;Saeng-Chuto et al, 2017;Song et al, 2015;Dong et al, 2015). Furthermore, recent studies reported that calves and chickens are also susceptible to PDCoV (Jung et al, 2017;Liang et al, 2019), and that PDCoV possesses the potential to infect humans (Li et al, 2018), highlighting a possible cross-species transmission related to this emerging virus.…”