Identification of an enterovirus recombinant with a torovirus-like gene insertion during a diarrhea outbreak in fattening pigs

Conceição-Neto, Nádia; Theuns, Sebastiaan; Cui, Tingting; Zeller, Mark; Yinda, Claude Kwe; Christiaens, Isaura; Heylen, Elisabeth; Van Ranst, Marc; Carpentier, Sebastien; Nauwynck, Hans J.; Matthijnssens, Jelle

Not unexpectedly, a great number of other eukaryotic viruses were identified using viral metagenomics. However, even though the pathogenic role of PEDV has been well demonstrated, for other viruses this link is less clear. For instance, the novel porcine circular virus described in this study is highly similar to another virus also identified in diarrheic pigs (Cheung et al. 2014) . Therefore, it still remains a possibility that these viruses infect pigs and might play a role in diarrhea, which needs further elucidation. Gemycircularviruses, on the other hand, have been identified in a great variety of hosts, and no link with diarrhea has been yet demonstrated. It is likely that these viruses have a diet or plant origin, especially because the virus found in the pig sample clusters together with two gemycircularviruses found in the feces of a healthy mongoose (Conceição-Neto et al. 2015) . As for the picobirnaviruses, in animals they have been identified in diarrheic and non-diarrheic samples (Ganesh et al. 2014) . The main issue with segmented viruses is to link the different segments to the same virus. In our case, we identified four capsid and three RdRp genes, and further research is needed to link the different segments to their respective RdRp. As capsid segments are more divergent than RdRp, it is unexpected that more capsid than RdRp segments were identified. However, it cannot be excluded that there were more picobirnaviruses present in the pool and/or a reassortment event occurred, as previously described (Conceição-Neto et al. 2016) .