Short communication Genetic typing of bovine viral diarrhoea virus isolates from India N. Mishra a , B. Pattnaik a , S. Vilcek b , S.S. Patil a , P. Jain a , N. Swamy a , S. Bhatia a , H.K. Pradhan a, * a High Security Animal Disease Laboratory, Indian Veterinary Research Institute, Anand Nagar, Bhopal 462021, MP, India b Department of Parasitology and Infectious Diseases, University of Veterinary Medicine, Komenskeho 73, Kosice, Slovak Republic Received 4 February 2004; received in revised form 29 July 2004; accepted 8 August 2004 Abstract Thirteen BVDV isolates collected in four geographic regions of India between 2000 and 2002 were typed in 5 0 -UTR. To confirm results of genetic typing, selected viruses were also analysed in the N pro region. Phylogenetic analysis revealed that all Indian BVDV isolates belong to BVDV-1b (Osloss-like group). Despite a long distance between the farms from which the viruses were isolated there was no correlation between the origin of viral isolates and their position in a phylogenetic tree. Higher genetic similarity of Indian BVDV isolates was observed most probably due to the uncontrolled movement of cattle as well as the uncontrolled use of semen from bulls for breeding of local and farm cattle in different states of India. # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Pestivirus; Bovine viral diarrhoea virus; Genetic typing 1. Introduction Bovine viral diarrhoea (BVD), an infectious multisymptomatic disease of cattle, has high eco- nomic importance worldwide (Bolin, 1993; Lindberg, 2003). The causative agent, BVD virus (BVDV), is a pestivirus of the family Flaviviridae. There are two genotypes of BVDV, BVDV-1 and BVDV-2 (Pellerin et al., 1994; Ridpath et al., 1994), which cause similar diseases except that infection with hypervirulent BVDV-2 strains may develop thrombocytopenia and haemorrhagic disease (Carman et al., 1998). The BVDV genome contains a single stranded, non-polyadenylated, positive sense RNA genome of approximately 12.3 kb in length, which is flanked at either 5 0 or 3 0 ends by the untranslated regions (5 0 - UTR and 3 0 -UTR). A single open reading frame (ORF) starts with N-terminal autoprotease (N pro ), followed by the viral structural proteins (C, E rns , E1 and E2) and 6–7 non-structural proteins (Collett et al., 1988). Genetic typing of BVDV has been mostly based on sequence comparisons of the 5 0 -UTR (Baule et al., 1997; Hurtado et al., 2003; Nagai et al., 1998; Ridpath et al., 1994; Vilcek et al., 2001), N pro (Becher et al., www.elsevier.com/locate/vetmic Veterinary Microbiology 104 (2004) 207–212 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 755 2759204; fax: +91 755 2758842. E-mail address: hkpradhan45@rediffmail.com (H.K. Pradhan). 0378-1135/$ – see front matter # 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.vetmic.2004.08.003