Identification and Genome Characterization of the First Sicinivirus Isolate from Chickens in Mainland China by Using Viral Metagenomics

Unlike traditional virus isolation and sequencing approaches, sequence-independent amplification based viral metagenomics technique allows one to discover unexpected or novel viruses efficiently while bypassing culturing step. Here we report the discovery of the first Sicinivirus isolate (designated as strain JSY) of picornaviruses from commercial layer chickens in mainland China by using a viral metagenomics technique. This Sicinivirus isolate, which contains a whole genome of 9,797 nucleotides (nt) excluding the poly(A) tail, possesses one of the largest picornavirus genome so far reported, but only shares 88.83% and 82.78% of amino acid sequence identity to that of ChPV1 100C (KF979332) and Sicinivirus 1 strain UCC001 (NC_023861), respectively. The complete 939 nt 5′UTR of the isolate strain contains at least twelve stem-loop domains (A–L), representing the highest set of loops reported within Sicinivirus genus. The conserved 'barbell-like' structure was also present in the 272 nt 3′UTR of the isolate as that in the 3′ UTR of Sicinivirus 1 strain UCC001. The 8,586 nt large open reading frame encodes a 2,862 amino acids polyprotein precursor. Moreover, Sicinivirus infection might be widely present in commercial chicken farms in Yancheng region of the Jiangsu Province as evidenced by all the tested stool samples from three different farms being positive (17/17) for Sicinivirus detection. This is the first report on identification of Sicinivirus in commercial layer chickens with a severe clinical disease in mainland China, however, further studies are needed to evaluate the pathogenic potential of this picornavirus in chickens.