SUMMARY
Lumpy skin disease virus (LSDV) is of high economic importance and has spread rapidly to many European and Asian countries in recent years. LSDVs spread to China in 2019 and have caused severe outbreaks in multiple provinces. The LSDVs in China have not been well investigated. Here we isolated an LSDV (GD01/2020) in southeast China and investigated its features in replication, phylogenetics, and genomics. GD01/2020 caused a typical LSD outbreak and replicated well in MDBK cells as detected by a novel quantitative real-time PCR assay targeting the viral GPCR gene. GD01/2020 was similar in phylogenetics to the one circulating in Xinjiang, China in 2019, and distinct from the LSDVs identified in other countries. In genomics, GD01/2020 was a vaccine-recombinant similar to those identified in Russia. A total of 13 major putative recombination events between a vaccine strain and a field strain were identified in the genome of GD01/2020, which could affect the virulence and transmissibility of the virus. The results suggested that the LSD outbreaks in China caused by a virulent vaccine-recombinant LSDV from the same unknown exotic source, and virulent vaccine-recombinant LSDVs obtained transboundary transmissibility. This report shed novel insights into the diagnosis, transmission, and control of the disease.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.