In recent years， novel Bluetongue virus (BTV) serotypes have been isolated and/or sequenced by researchers within the field. During Bluetongue surveillance activities， we identified a putative novel BTV serotype in healthy goats from Sardinia， Italy. RNAs purified from blood and serum samples were positive for BTV by a generic real time RT-PCR and c-ELISA， respectively， whereas genotyping and serotyping were unsuccessful. By NGS， the whole genome sequence was obtained from two blood samples (BTV-X ITL2015 strains 34200 and 33531). Overall， Seg 2 of BTV-X ITL2015 shows the highest identity (75.3-75.5% nt/77.4-78.1% aa) with recently isolated BTV-27s from Corsica and with the last discovered BTV XJ1... More
In recent years， novel Bluetongue virus (BTV) serotypes have been isolated and/or sequenced by researchers within the field. During Bluetongue surveillance activities， we identified a putative novel BTV serotype in healthy goats from Sardinia， Italy. RNAs purified from blood and serum samples were positive for BTV by a generic real time RT-PCR and c-ELISA， respectively， whereas genotyping and serotyping were unsuccessful. By NGS， the whole genome sequence was obtained from two blood samples (BTV-X ITL2015 strains 34200 and 33531). Overall， Seg 2 of BTV-X ITL2015 shows the highest identity (75.3-75.5% nt/77.4-78.1% aa) with recently isolated BTV-27s from Corsica and with the last discovered BTV XJ1407 from China (75.9% nt /78.2% aa)， whereas it is less related with BTV-25 from Switzerland (73.0% nt/75.0% aa) and BTV-26 from Kuwait (62.0% nt/60.5% aa). A specific RT-qPCR targeting Seg 2 of BTV-X ITL2015 was assessed in this study. Considering the Seg 2/VP2 identity of BTV-X ITL2015 with BTV-25， 26， 27s and BTV XJ1407 and that serum of BTV-X ITL2015 infected goats failed to neutralize all tested extant serotypes， we propose the existence of a novel BTV serotype circulating in goats in Sardinia. Isolation was so far unsuccessful thus hampering proper antigenic characterization.
