Outbreak of piglet diarrhea associated with a new reassortant porcine rotavirus B

Rotavirus B (RVB) is a causative agent leading to acute viral gastroenteritis diarrhea in both children and young animals, and has been commonly detected in piglets. In order to determine the causative agent of diarrheal outbreak occurring in December 2022 in piglets from a pig herd in Luoyang, Henan province of China, four common viral pathogens causing piglet diarrhea-three coronaviruses and rotavirus A (RVA) were first tested and found negative, therefore metagenomic sequencing was performed to explore other potential pathogens in the diarrheal samples. Unexpectedly, the most abundant viral reads mapped to RVB, and were de novo assembled to complete 11 viral gene segments. Sequence comparisons revealed that 5 gene segments encoding VP1, VP2, VP3, NSP3 and NSP4 of RVB strain designated as HNLY-2022 are most closely related to RVB strains derived from herbivores with low nucleotide similarities of 65.7–75.3%, and the remaining segments were relatively close to porcine RVB strains with the VP4 gene segment showing very low nucleotide identity (65.0%) with reference strains, indicating HNLY-2022 is a new reassortant RVB strain. Based on the previously proposed genotype classification criterion, the genotype constellation of RVB strain HNLY-2022 is G6-P[6]-I4-R6-C6-M6-A7-N5-T7-E5-H4 with more than half of the genotypes (P[6], R6, C6, M6, T7 and E5) newly reported. Therefore, the new reassortant RVB strain is the likely causative agent for the diarrheal outbreak of piglets occurred in China and more epidemiological studies should be conducted to monitor the spread of this newly identified porcine RVB strain.