Artem P. Lisachov‡, Lada Lisachova§, Evgeniy Simonov§Corresponding author: Artem Lisachov ( aplisachev@gmail.com ) Corresponding author: Evgeniy Simonov ( ev.simonov@gmail.com ) © Artem Lisachov, Lada Lisachova, Evgeniy Simonov. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Lisachov AP, Lisachova L, Simonov E (2021) First record of ranavirus (Ranavirus sp.) in Siberia, Russia. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e79774 |  |
Ranaviruses are a group of double-strand DNA viruses that infect fish, amphibians and reptiles. These viruses are responsible for mass fish and amphibian mortality events worldwide, both in the wild and at the fish and amphibian farms. The number of detected epizootics has grown significantly in recent years. In Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, including Russia, very few ranavirosis monitoring studies have been conducted, in contrast with Western Europe and America. In the present work, we used a qPCR assay to survey for the first time the amphibian populations of West Siberia (Russia) for the presence of ranaviruses. In total, we studied 252 tissue samples from six amphibian species, collected across West Siberia from the south to the Arctic regions. We report a single infected sample: a common toad (Bufo bufo) captured near Tyumen city. The phylogenetic analysis showed that the detected virus strain belongs to the CMTV lineage. This is only the second observation of Ranavirus in Russia.