ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cell. Infect. Microbiol.
Sec. Clinical Infectious Diseases
This article is part of the Research TopicMajor Global Public Health Concerns: Insights into the Challenges of Climate Change and Emerging Infectious DiseasesView all 6 articles
A Circovirus-Like Genomic Sequence with Unique Architecture and Phylogenetic Relatedness to Human-Linked Viral Lineages
Provisionally accepted
Quan Shen1*
Liyan Dai1Lichen Mao1
Shi Wenhui1
Ndjekadom Alfred1
Xiaochun Wang1
Yuwei Liu1
Shixing Yang1
Likai Ji1Jiangqiang Wang2Jin Ma3
Wen Zhang1- 1Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang, China
- 2Jintan First People's Hospital, Changzhou, China
- 3Zhenjiang First People's Hospital, Zhenjiang, China
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Circoviruses are small viruses in the Circoviridae family that associate with a wide spectrum of disease from asymptomatic to lethal in different animal. In the current study, a novel swine-origin circovirus with unique genomic architecture was determined from both oropharyngeal swabs and fecal samples collected from febrile pigs in Jiangsu Province, China. The complete genome sequence of this novel porcine circovirus strain (named as PCV-CH-ZJ01) was determined to be 2544 nt in length, containing four major open reading frames: Rep1, 498-833 nt, 112 aa; Rep2, 1055-1546 nt, 164 aa; Cap1, 1756-2055 nt, 100 aa; Cap2, 2089-2529 nt, 147 aa. Comparative sequence analysis revealed differential conservation patterns across viral components and shared low amino acid similarity with other strains on the whole. Phylogenetic trees based the whole genome and amino acid of two Reps revealed that PCV-CH-ZJ01 belonged to circovirus and clustered with human and rhesus macaque circovirus strains, which raised the concerns of potential cross-species transmission between swine and human.
Keywords: Circovirus, genomic structure, Swine, cross-species transmission, viral metagenomics
Received: 03 Sep 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Shen, Dai, Mao, Wenhui, Alfred, Wang, Liu, Yang, Ji, Wang, Ma and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Quan Shen
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