Genital warts in Burmeister's porpoises: characterization of Phocoena spinipinnis papillomavirus type 1 (PsPV-1) and evidence for a second, distantly related PsPV.

Marie-Françoise van Bressem (1) , Patricia Cassonnet (2) , Annabel Rector (3) , Christian Desaintes (4) , Koen van Waerebeek (1) , Joanna Alfaro-Shigueto (5) , Marc van Ranst (3) , Gérard Orth (2)

1 Cetean Conservation Medicine Group (CMED)
2 Département de Virologie - Department of Virology
3 Laboratory of Clinical and Epidemiological Virology
4 Nuclear Research Centre
5 Asociacion ProDelphinus

We identified sequences from two distantly related papillomaviruses in genital warts from two Burmeister's porpoises, including a PV antigen-positive specimen, and characterized Phocoena spinipinnis papillomavirus type 1 (PsPV-1). The PsPV-1 genome comprises 7879 nt and presents unusual features. It lacks an E7, an E8 and a bona fide E5 open reading frame (ORF) and has a large E6 ORF. PsPV-1 L1 ORF showed the highest percentage of nucleotide identity (54-55 %) with human papillomavirus type 5, bovine papillomavirus type 3 (BPV-3) and Tursiops truncatus papillomavirus type 2 (TtPV-2). This warrants the classification of PsPV-1 as the prototype of the genus Omikronpapillomavirus. PsPV-1 clustered with TtPV-2 in the E6 and E1E2 phylogenetic trees and with TtPV-2 and BPV-3 in the L2L1 tree. This supports the hypothesis that PV evolution may not be monophyletic across all genes.

Domaines: Virologie

Marie-Françoise van Bressem, Patricia Cassonnet, Annabel Rector, Christian Desaintes, Koen van Waerebeek, et al.. Genital warts in Burmeister's porpoises: characterization of Phocoena spinipinnis papillomavirus type 1 (PsPV-1) and evidence for a second, distantly related PsPV.. Journal of General Virology, 2007, 88 (Pt 7), pp.1928-33. ⟨10.1099/vir.0.82694-0⟩. ⟨pasteur-00175219⟩