Inclusion body disease (IBD) is an infectious fatal disease of snakes typified by behavioral abnormalities, wasting, and secondary infections. At a histopathological level, the disease is identified by the presence of large eosinophilic cytoplasmic inclusions in multiple tissues. To date, no virus or other pathogen has been definitively characterized or associated with the disease. Using a metagenomic approach to search for candidate etiologic agents in snakes with confirmed IBD, we identified and de novo assembled the complete genomic sequences of two viruses related to arenaviruses, and a third arenavirus-like sequence was discovered by screening an additional set of samples. A continuous boa constrictor cell line was established and used to propagate and isolate one of the viruses in culture. Viral nucleoprotein was localized and concentrated within large cytoplasmic inclusions in infected cells in culture and tissues from diseased snakes. In total, viral RNA was detected in 6/8 confirmed IBD cases and 0/18 controls. These viruses have a typical arenavirus genome organization but are highly divergent, belonging to a lineage separate from that of the Old and New World arenaviruses. Furthermore, these viruses encode envelope glycoproteins that are more similar to those of filoviruses than to those of other arenaviruses. These findings implicate these viruses as candidate etiologic agents of IBD. The presence of arenaviruses outside mammals reveals that these viruses infect an unexpectedly broad range of species and represent a new reservoir of potential human pathogens.
Pubmed ID: 22893382 RIS Download
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Software for a de novo genome assembler implemented in C++.
View all literature mentionsTHIS RESOURCE IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE. Documented on February 28,2023. Software program for clustering biological sequences with many applications in various fields such as making non-redundant databases, finding duplicates, identifying protein families, filtering sequence errors and improving sequence assembly etc. It is very fast and can handle extremely large databases. CD-HIT helps to significantly reduce the computational and manual efforts in many sequence analysis tasks and aids in understanding the data structure and correct the bias within a dataset. The CD-HIT package has CD-HIT, CD-HIT-2D, CD-HIT-EST, CD-HIT-EST-2D, CD-HIT-454, CD-HIT-PARA, PSI-CD-HIT, CD-HIT-OTU and over a dozen scripts. * CD-HIT (CD-HIT-EST) clusters similar proteins (DNAs) into clusters that meet a user-defined similarity threshold. * CD-HIT-2D (CD-HIT-EST-2D) compares 2 datasets and identifies the sequences in db2 that are similar to db1 above a threshold. * CD-HIT-454 identifies natural and artificial duplicates from pyrosequencing reads. * CD-HIT-OTU cluster rRNA tags into OTUs The usage of other programs and scripts can be found in CD-HIT user''s guide. CD-HIT was originally developed by Dr. Weizhong Li at Dr. Adam Godzik''s Lab at the Burnham Institute (now Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute).
View all literature mentionsWeb phylogeny server based on the maximum-likelihood principle.
View all literature mentionsCell line Vero is a Spontaneously immortalized cell line with a species of origin Chlorocebus sabaeus
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