Padronization of viral enrichment in swines serum samples for application in metagenomics

• Grant number: 22/00484-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: July 01, 2022
• End date: June 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Agronomical Sciences - Veterinary Medicine - Preventive Veterinary Medicine
• Principal Investigator: João Pessoa Araújo Junior
• Grantee: Mylena Marinelo Jorge Pereira
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biotecnologia (IBTEC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Botucatu. Botucatu , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The development of agriculture and livestock near natural areas provides contact between human populations and their domestic animals with populations of wild animals in their habitats, facilitating the spread of infectious and parasitic agents to new hosts and environments. Animals such as domestic swine, for example, have great potential to act as a reservoir of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, as they can carry different types of zoonoses. Therefore, it is of great importance, in the context of single health, to carry out monitoring actions in domestic "sentinel" animals so that infectious diseases are detected early, preventing the emergence and spread of high-risk zoonotic diseases for the population, such as COVID-19. In this context, metagenomics becomes a screening tool for the independent targeting of viral pathogens, public health monitoring, and virus genome discovery. However, there is a low relative concentration of viral nucleic acid in the samples compared to non-viral genomes such as bacteria or host cells, for example. This can make detection impossible during the sequencing steps, making this a limiting factor of the technique. Therefore, aiming at the active surveillance of sentinel animals in Paraná through viral metagenomics, the methodological standardization of viral enrichment of serum samples from subsistence swine collected in 200 municipalities of the state will be carried out.(AU)