Sequence analysis of the foot and mouth disease virus type O/IRN/2007 VP1 gene from Iranian isolate

The foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV) causes a vesicular and contagious disease of cloven-hoofed animals. In this study, the virus was isolated from vesicles of the infected cattle using cell culture and serotyped by ELISA test. The extracted RNA from the infected cells was reverse transcribed and amplified using VP1 gene-specific primer pairs by means of one-step RT-PCR. The purified VP1 gene was sub-cloned into the uniqe KpnI and BamHI cloning sites of the pcDNA3.1+ vector. The DH5α strain of E. coli was transformed by the vector. The sequences of sub-cloned FMDV type O/IRN/2007 VP1 were aligned with FMDV type O/UKG/2001 VP1 using MegAlign software. Nucleotide sequence comparisons were made using the BLAST software available from the NCBI website. The amino acid sequences of three sub-cloned FMDV type O/IRN/2007 VP1 were also aligned with three other similar sequences using MegAlign software. Nineteen of the most similar VP1 nucleotide sequences (by BLASTN program), FMDV O/IRN/2007 VP1 sequence, twenty isolates of FMDV-O VP1 in Iran and eight topotypes of FMDV type O were aligned by Mega5 to create a FMDV-O VP1-based sequence similarity tree. The nucleotide sequence comparison indicated that FMDV O/ IRN/2007 VP1 had the greatest nucleotide sequence similarity to the VP1 gene of FMDV O1/Manisa/Turkey/69 (99%), FMDV O1/Manisa/Netherlands (98%) and FMDV O1/Manisa/iso87/Turkey (98%). It was also observed that the highest identity between FMDV O/IRN/2007 VP1 sequence and other nucleotide sequences of FMDV type O VP1 genes isolated in Iran during 1997-2004 was about 91%.