The enteric virome of cats with feline panleukopenia differs in
abundance and diversity from healthy cats
Abstract
Feline panleukopenia (FPL) is a severe, often fatal disease caused by
feline parvovirus (FPV). How infection with FPV might impact the
composition of the entire eukaryotic enteric virome in cats has not been
characterized. We used metatranscriptomic and viral particle enrichment
metagenomic approaches to characterize the enteric viromes of 23 cats
naturally infected with FPV (FPV-cases) and 36 age-matched healthy
shelter cats (healthy controls). Sequencing reads were detected from 11
mammalian infecting viral families mostly belonging to
Coronaviridae, Parvoviridae and Astroviridae. Among the
healthy control cats the most abundant viruses were Feline coronavirus,
Mamastrovirus 2 and Carnivore bocaparvovirus 3 (Feline
bocavirus 1) with frequent co-infections of all three. Feline
chaphamaparvovirus was only detected in healthy controls (6/36, 16.7%).
Among the FPV-cases, in addition to FPV, the most abundant viruses were
Mamastrovirus 2, Feline coronavirus and Carnivore
bocaparvovirus 4 (Feline bocaparvovirus 2). The latter and Feline
bocaparvovirus 3 were detected significantly more frequently in
FPV-cases than in healthy controls. Feline calicivirus was
present in a high proportion of FPV-cases (11/23, 47.8%) compared to
healthy controls (5/36, 13.9%, p=0.0067). Feline kobuvirus infections
were also common among FPV-cases (9/23, 39.1%) and were not detected in
any healthy control cats (p<0.0001). While abundant in both
groups, astroviruses were more frequently present in FPV-cases (19/23,
82.6%) than in healthy controls (18/36, p=0.0142). The differences in
eukaryotic virome composition found in this study indicate that further
investigations to determine associations between enteric viral
co-infections on clinical disease severity in cats with FPL are
warranted.