BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Vet. Sci.
Sec. Veterinary Infectious Diseases
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fvets.2025.1686098
This article is part of the Research TopicHigh-Impact Respiratory RNA Virus Diseases, Volume IIView all 9 articles
Bovine viral diarrhea virus 2 strains generate deletion viral genomes primarily in the NS2 region of the viral genome
Provisionally accepted
David Holthausen1*
Darrell Bayles1
John D Neill1
Rohana P Dassanayake1
Shollie Falkenberg2Daniel W. Nielsen1Anna K. Goldkamp1
Harish Menghwar1,3
Eduardo Casas1- 1USDA-ARS National Animal Disease Center, Ames, United States
- 2Auburn University College of Veterinary Medicine, Auburn, United States
- 3Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, Oak Ridge, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Bovine viral diarrhea virus (BVDV) is a virus of economic concern for the cattle industry worldwide. Transplacental BVDV infection during pregnancy, before sufficient maturation of the fetal immune system, results in significant reproductive losses via spontaneous abortion and the generation of offspring that are persistently infected and immunotolerant to the infected noncytopathic BVDV strain. These persistently infected animals act as reservoirs and are the major source of BVDV transmission within the herd. Previously, we reported bioinformatic analyses showing that BVDV1a and 1b genotypes generate distinct sets of diverse deletion viral genomes (DelVGs) during the natural viral life cycle. Deletion viral genomes are generated by skipping events that occur during genome synthesis by the error-prone viral replication machinery. These replication deficient genomes play many roles in host-pathogen interactions, including being implicated in the establishment of viral persistence. Here, we analyzed twenty-one field isolates of the BVDV2 genotype for the presence and characterization of DelVGs using Illumina MiSeq BVDV2 genome sequencing reads. BVDV2 strains generate significantly more NS2 DelVGs than any other region of the genome, with over 90% of those deletions having both 5` and 3` junctions in the NS2 region of the genome. BVDV2c strains produce approximately one hundred fifty times as many DelVG reads as BVDV2a strains. Of the BVDV2a isolates queried, cytopathic BVDV2a strains generated twice as many NS2 DelVG reads as compared to noncytopathic BVDV2a strains.
Keywords: Bovine viral diarrhea virus 2, Pestivirus, nonstandard viral genomes, deletion viralgenomes, Viral Evolution
Received: 14 Aug 2025; Accepted: 08 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Holthausen, Bayles, Neill, Dassanayake, Falkenberg, Nielsen, Goldkamp, Menghwar and Casas. 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: David Holthausen, USDA-ARS National Animal Disease Center, Ames, United States
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.