3.6 Picornaviridae
Feline kobuvirus belongs to the species Aichivirus Aand was first identified in cats
with diarrhoea in South Korea. Other studies have reported an
association between feline kobuvirus and diarrhoea in cats (Lu et al.,
2018; Niu et al., 2019). Notably, we only detected feline kobuvirus
contigs in FPV-cases in 9/23
(39.1%) FPV cat libraries (p < 0.0001, Figure 2). Seven of
the nine kobuvirus-infected cats were kittens (6 – 9 weeks), two were
adults (1-2 years) and four were known to have had diarrhoea. The feline
kobuvirus sequences in this study formed a clade in both the full genome
and VP1 phylogenies, although feline kobuvirus sequence FPV-9 branches
off from the other sequences in this study in both phylogenies (Figure
7).
We also identified Feline picornavirus contigs in 0/23 FPV-case
libraries and 2/36 healthy controls (p= 0.5161, Figure 2). One healthy
control library (cat #AWL8) contained a complete genome with 85.6%
nucleotide and 96.1% amino acid similarity to Feline
picornavirus strain 073F in the complete polyprotein. Comparison of the
3D protein identified in both libraries showed 96.1% amino acid
similarity to Feline picornavirus strain 127F. The read abundance
in the metatranscriptome libraries was 82 and 57 RPM and in the
metagenome libraries 42,971 and 6,436 RPM for cats #AWL8 and #AWL9,
respectively.