Molecular detection of novel circoviruses in ticks in northeastern China

Abstract Novel circular single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) genomes have been found in various animals using high-throughput sequencing techniques. In this study, two circular ssDNA genomes were detected in adult ticks from northeastern China by Solexa sequencing and PCR. The two sequences shared a similar genomic organization to circoviruses, with genomes of 1936 bp (TiCV-1) and 1812 bp (TiCV-2), each including two major open read frames (ORFs), ORF1 and ORF2, encoding putative replicase and capsid proteins, respectively. The potential stem-loop structure of a circovirus was predicted in the intergenic region between the two ORFs. Sequence comparison showed that the genome of TiCV-2 was almost the same as that of TiCV-1, except for two deletions and several mutations, and they had a high identity of 71.3–72.9% with Raven circovirus. The infection rates of circoviruses were calculated by the maximum likelihood estimation as 3.2% (95% CI, 1.9–5.2%) for TiCV-1 in the investigated Haemaphysalis longicornis , and 1.2% (95% CI, 0.2–4.0%) for TiCV-2 in Ixodes crenulatus from Yichun of Heilongjiang Province. These results indicate that the two sequences are distantly related to known circovirus genomes and may represent novel species in the family Circoviridae.