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.