Tilapia Lake Virus (TiLV) from Vietnam is genetically distantly related to TiLV strains from other countries

Tilapia Lake Virus (TiLV) is reported as a threat to tilapia aquaculture in 16 countries on four continents with outbreaks causing up to 90% mortality. This research is one of the first studies on TiLVs from Vietnam. We propagated successfully one TiLV isolate HB196-VN-2020 from a diseased tilapia sample using an E-11 cell line and evaluated its virulence in two different weights of red hybrid tilapia and three serial 10-fold diluted viral titers. Smaller fish (4.5 ± 1.98 g) were proved to be more susceptible to TiLV infection at the viral titre of 9.1 × 10⁵ TCID₅₀ fish^-1 than larger fish (20.8 ± 7.5 g) with the mortalities of 92.5% and 12.5%, respectively. Reassortant detection analysis revealed seven potential reassortment events among 23 TiLV genomes, indicating the mixed infection of multiple TiLV isolates at the farms and the fish movement among different regions. Seven maximum likelihood phylogenetic trees based on the individual segments or the concatenated coding regions of some segments showed the genetically distant relationship of the Southern Vietnamese isolate RIA2-VN-2019 with the 21 reference isolates, and suggest the different origins of two Vietnamese TiLV isolates (RIA2-VN-2019 and HB196-VN-2020). However, additional sequences from various sampling locations and times are required to better understand the impacts of genetic diversity and reassortments on the evolution, migration and natural selection of TiLVs in Vietnam and other countries.