Molecular epidemiology and phylogenetic analysis of diverse bovine astroviruses associated with diarrhea in cattle and water buffalo calves in China

ALFRED, Niyokwishimira; LIU, Huan; LI, Mu Lan; HONG, Shao Feng; TANG, Hai Bo; WEI, Zu Zhang; CHEN, Ying; LI, Fa Kai; ZHONG, Yi Zhi; HUANG, Wei Jian

The status of co-infection of BAstV with other bovine gastrointestinal viruses: To assess the status of co-infection with BAstV and other bovine gastrointestinal viruses, 32 samples randomly selected from our study stock were subjected to RT-PCR analysis. Six viruses: bovine astrovirus (BAstV), bovine enterovirus (BEV), bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV), bovine coronavirus (BCoV), bovine rotavirus (BRV) and bovine torovirus (BToV) were analyzed in accordance with the results of previous studies [7, 8, 11, 20, 27] . The primer sequences used for detection of gastrointestinal viruses other than astrovirus are shown in Table 2 . As shown in Table 3 , our results clearly demonstrated BAstV co-infections with one or more gastrointestinal viruses in 87.5% (28/32) of cases. Interestingly, 4 (12.5%) of 32 samples were only positive for BAstV and negative for the all other gastrointestinal viruses tested in this study. Thus, the co-infection status was as follows: BEV, 53.1% (17/32); BAstV, 46.9% (15/32); BVDV, 18.7% (6/32); BCoV, 15.6% (5/32); BRV, 6.25% (2/32); and BToV, 0% (0/32).