Prevalence of BPV genotypes in a German cowshed determined by a novel multiplex BPV genotyping assay

Bovine papillomaviruses (BPV) induce benign tumours of the cutaneous or mucosal epithelia in cattle, but are also involved in the development of cancer of the urinary bladder and of the upper gastrointestinal tract. Current BPV genotyping assays employ techniques developed originally for the detection of human papillomaviruses. These methods rely on consensus PCR amplification and subsequent sequencing and are cumbersome and limited in their analytic sensitivity to detect BPV, especially in multiple infections. In this study, a novel multiplex BPV genotyping assay is described to detect sensitively and specifically BPV-1 to -10 as well as BaPV-11. The assay is based on a multiplex PCR using novel broad-spectrum bovine papillomavirus (BSBP) primers followed by multiplex bovine genotyping (MBG) by Luminex xMAP technology. The detection limit of the assay was shown to be between 10 and 100 BPV genomes. In a first application, BPV was detected in 100% of wart preparations with BPV-8 being most prevalent, followed by types 6, 1 and 10. The majority of warts were positive for at least four BPV types. In conclusion, BSBP-PCR/MBG is a powerful high-throughput method suitable for the study of the natural history of BPV and could be useful to veterinarians for the monitoring of the efficacy of future BPV vaccines.