Abstract:
African swine fever virus is a complex DNA virus
that infects swine and is spread by ticks. Mortality
rates in domestic pigs are very high and the virus is
a significant threat to pork farming. The genomes of
16 viruses have been sequenced completely, but these
represent only a few of the 23 genotypes. The viral
genome is unusual in that it contains 5 multigene
families, each of which contain 3-19 duplicated copies
(paralogs). There is significant sequence divergence
between the paralogs in a single virus and between the
orthologs in the different viral genomes. This, together
with the fact that in most of the multigene families
there are numerous gene indels that create truncations
and fusions, makes annotation of these regions very
difficult; it has led to inconsistent annotation of the 16
viral genomes. In this project, we have created multiple
sequence alignments for each of the multigene families
and have produced gene maps to help researchers more
easily understand the organization of the multigene
families among the different viruses. These gene maps
will help researchers ascertain which members of the
multigene families are present in each of the viruses.
This is critical because some of the multigene families
are known to be associated with virus virulence.
