Isolation and Pathogenic Characterization of Pigeon Paramyxovirus Type 1 via Different Inoculation Routes in Pigeons

Han Chang; Shengyong Feng; Yutian Wang; Fuhuang Li; Qianqian Su; Bo Wang; Juan Du; Hongxuan He

doi:10.3389/fvets.2020.569901

Isolation and Pathogenic Characterization of Pigeon Paramyxovirus Type 1 via Different Inoculation Routes in Pigeons

Front Vet Sci. 2021 Feb 17:7:569901. doi: 10.3389/fvets.2020.569901. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Han Chang^{1

2}, Shengyong Feng^{1

2}, Yutian Wang³, Fuhuang Li³, Qianqian Su^{1

2}, Bo Wang^{1

2}, Juan Du^{1

2}, Hongxuan He¹

Affiliations

¹ National Research Center for Wildlife-Borne Diseases, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² College of Life Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Department of Microbiology, Beijing General Station of Animal Husbandry, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Pigeon paramyxovirus type I (PPMV-1) causes regular outbreaks in pigeons and even poses a pandemic threat among chickens and other birds. The birds infected with PPMV-1 mainly show a pathological damage in the respiratory system, digestive system, and nervous system. However, there were few reports on the efficiency of the virus entering the host via routes of different systems. In the present study, a PPMV-1 strain was obtained from a dead wild pigeon in 2016 in Beijing, China. The mean death time (MDT) and the intracerebral pathogenicity (ICPI) of our isolate showed medium virulence. Phylogenetic analysis based on F gene sequence showed that the isolate belonged to subgenotype VIb, class II, which dominated in China in recent years. Then, we evaluated the infection efficiency of different routes. Pigeons were randomly divided into five groups of six as follows: intracephalic (IC), intranasal (IN), and intraoral (IO) infection routes, cohabitation infection (CO), and negative control (N negative). All pigeons were inoculated with 100 μl·10⁶ EID₅₀ PPMV-1 virus. After infection, pathological lesions, virus shedding, body weight change, survival rate, and tissue tropism were tested to compare the efficiency of the different infected routes. The mortality of groups IC, IN, IO, and CO were 100, 66.7, 50, and 33.3%, respectively. Weight loss in group IC was higher than the other groups, followed by groups IN and IO. The lesions observed in PPMV-1-infected pigeons were severe, especially in the lung and intestine in group IC. Viral shedding was observed from 2 dpi in groups IC and IN, but the shedding rate was higher in group IN than group IC. The longest period was in group CO. Tissue tropism experiment showed that our isolate has a wide range of tissue distribution, and the virus titer in the heart and intestine of group IC and in the brain of group IN was higher. Our data may help us to evaluate the risk of transmission of PPMV-1.

Keywords: Newcastle disease; paramyxovirus; pathogenicity; pigeon; route; virus.