Ball Python Nidovirus: a Candidate Etiologic Agent for Severe Respiratory Disease in Python regius

Stenglein, Mark D.; Jacobson, Elliott R.; Wozniak, Edward J.; Wellehan, James F. X.; Kincaid, Anne; Gordon, Marcus; Porter, Brian F.; Baumgartner, Wes; Stahl, Scott; Kelley, Karen; Towner, Jonathan S.; DeRisi, Joseph L.

Disease association and tissue tropism. Using this complete genome sequence as a reference, we assessed whether other case and control samples contained sequences from similar viruses as determined by BLASTn (30) . Nearly identical sequences were present in the fully filtered data sets of all 8 sequenced diseased snakes (see Table S2 in the supplemental material). The read coverage in the other data sets was not sufficient to generate complete genome assemblies, but the average pairwise nucleotide identity of reads aligning was Õ†95% in all cases, suggesting that other diseased snakes were infected by closely related strains of the virus (see Table S2 ). Conversely, we never observed similar sequences in 57 data sets from tissues from unaffected ball pythons and from other snakes that were collected for other studies. These control data sets corresponded to various tissues (mainly not lung) from a number of snake species, including ball pythons (n Ï­ 2), other python species (n Ï­ 3), boa constrictors (n Ï­ 39), other boa species (n Ï­ 10), black-tailed rattlesnakes (n Ï­ 1), and California king snakes (n Ï­ 2).