Pathogenicity and genomic characterization of a pseudorabies virus variant isolated from Bartha-K61-vaccinated swine population in China

•The PRV variant TJ strain was isolated from a vaccinated pig farm in China.•Bartha-K61 strain could not provide complete protection from TJ strain challenge.•TJ strain exhibited higher pathogenicity in mice and pigs, compared with SC strain.•The TJ strain genome showed extensive, unique variations in most viral proteins.

Pseudorabies (PR) or Aujeszky's disease (AD), caused by pseudorabies virus (PRV), is an economically important viral disease worldwide. Recently, PR outbreaks occurred in a large number of Bartha-K61-vaccinated swine herds in many regions of China. Here, we isolated a PRV variant, named TJ strain, from a Bartha-K61-vaccinated pig farm in China, evaluated the pathogenicity of the TJ strain in susceptible animals and analyzed its complete genomic sequence obtained by 454 pyrosequencing. Vaccination-challenge experiment in sheep showed that the classical Bartha-K61 vaccine could not provide complete protection against the challenge with the PRV TJ strain. In mice, the 50% lethal dose (LD50) of the TJ strain (102.3 TCID50) was lower than that of the classical PRV SC strain (103.0 TCID50). Furthermore, the TJ strain displayed higher mortality for pigs, as compared with the SC strain. The PRV TJ strain genome was determined to be 143,642 bp in length, encoding 67 open reading frames. The TJ strain was clustered to an independent branch together with some recent PRV isolates in China in the phylogenetic tree, which was relatively distant from previous PRV isolates. The TJ strain showed unique variations in the viral proteins that play key roles in the viral replication cycle. Taken together, the TJ strain is a highly pathogenic PRV variant with unique molecular signatures. Further studies are needed to explore the relevance of the sequence differences to the virulence alteration of the PRV variant.