Detection of Gammacoronaviruses from live bird markets, Tehran, 2020

Infectious Bronchitis Virus is a Gammacoronavirus responsible for huge economic loss to poultry industry worldwide. Poultry (Gallus gallus) is the major host of the virus, but IBV-like coronaviruses can infect different species of birds. To determine the role of different bird species in infectious bronchitis virus epidemiology, this work was conducted to detect Gammacoronaviruses in Tehran live bird market. Cloacal swabs were collected from three bird species including poultry, duck and turkey; the RNA was extracted by CinnaPure isolation kit; subsequently the complementary DNA was synthetized by RevertAid First strand kit. Polymerase chain reactions targeting two genes of the nucleocapsid and the spike were run on complementary DNAs synthetized in the previous step. Polymerase chain reactions successfully detected the spike and the nucleocapsid genes in 40% of poultry and 66.6% of turkeys, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis showed that gammacoronaviruses detected in this work were closely related to infectious bronchitis virus type 4/91. This work also introduced the circulation of gammacoronaviruses in different bird species from a bird market, this issue could be significant in the future epidemiologic studies. The findings also described that the nucleocapsid gene detection is much more effective than the spike gene detection in terms of gammacoronavirus monitoring.