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. 2024 Sep 10;86(9):986-991.
doi: 10.1292/jvms.24-0243. Epub 2024 Jul 26.

First report of fesavirus 4 detection from cats in Japan

Shwe Thiri Maung Maung Khin  1 , Mohammad Jafar Sheikhi  1 , Hitoshi Takemae  1   2 , Tetsuya Mizutani  1   2 , Tetsuya Furuya  1   3
Affiliations

First report of fesavirus 4 detection from cats in Japan

Shwe Thiri Maung Maung Khin et al. J Vet Med Sci. .

Abstract

Fesaviruses, picorna-like RNA viruses, were discovered in 2014 in feces from cats in an animal shelter in the United States but have not since been reported elsewhere. In this study, we collected cat fecal samples from 20 adult cats from an animal shelter in Tokyo, Japan, and examined them for viral pathogens. Next generation sequencing (NGS) was performed to detect both RNA and DNA virus sequences. Sequences of a total of 7 RNA viruses including some common feline pathogenic viruses were detected across 8 samples, while no DNA virus sequences were identified in any sample. Of the RNA virus sequences detected in the samples, two sequences, 4,746 and 4,439 bp, demonstrated 90.3% and 85.0% similarity, respectively, to the fesavirus 4 sequence in the database. To confirm the NGS results, quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) assays were developed using specific primers and probes designed based on the contig sequences. Based on the qRT-PCR assays, we detected relatively high copy-numbers of fesavirus 4 RNA in the two fecal samples from which the fesavirus 4 sequences were originally obtained, and low copy numbers in other samples. These results demonstrate the presence of fesavirus 4 in cats in Japan for the first time.

Keywords: animal shelter; cat feces sample; fesavirus 4; next-generation sequencing; picorna-like virus.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest involved in this study.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Schematic presentations of the previously reported fesavirus 4 (KM017739) and the ones detected in this study. Large open reading frames (ORFs) containing the putative RdRp domain and capsid ORFs are shown as boxes, and the entire sequences lengths are shown in the right next to the sequences. Asterisks show the ends of the sequences without stop codons and, under the bars, the ORF’s starting position numbers are shown in nucleotides from the beginnings of the sequences. Schematic presentation of construction of the entire fesavirus 4-C12 sequence is shown in lower panel in the figure.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Phylogenetic tree of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) regions of fesavirus 4 sequences in this study and the closest 30 amino acid sequences obtained with BLASTP. The tree was constructed using the maximum-likelihood method with bootstrap replicates of 100. Bootstrap values above 50% are shown. The scale bar corresponds to 0.5 substitution per site. Two sequences of the fesavirus 4 detected in this study are marked with filled triangles. Two large clades are shown as I and II, and outgroups including fesavirus 1 are also shown at the bottom. Host species names are described as species names in parentheses and common names in boxes.
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