Genomic analysis of two Chinese isolates of hyphantria cunea nucleopolyhedrovirus reveals a novel species of alphabaculovirus that infects hyphantria cunea drury (lepidoptera: arctiidae)

Background Baculoviruses act as effective biological control agents against the invasive pest Hyphantria cunea Drury. In this study, two Chinese Hyphantria cunea nucleopolyhedrovirus (HycuNPV) isolates, HycuNPV-BJ and HycuNPV-HB, were deep sequenced and compared with the Japanese isolate, HycuNPV-N9, to determine whole-genome level diversity and evolutionary history. Results The divergence of the phylogenetic tree and the K2P distances based on 38 core-gene concatenated alignment revealed that two Chinese HycuNPV isolates were a novel species of Alphabaculovirus that infected Hyphantria cunea in China. The gene contents indicated significant differences in the HycuNPV genomes between the Chinese and Japanese isolates. The differences included gene deletions, acquisitions and structural transversions, but the main difference was the high number of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In total, 10,393 SNPs, corresponding to approximately 8% of the entire HycuNPV-N9 genome sequence, were detected in the aligned reads. By analyzing non-synonymous variants, we found that hotspot mutation-containing genes had mainly unknown functions and most were early expressing genes. We found that the hycu78 gene which had early and late promoter was under positive selection. Biological activity assays revealed that the infectivity of HycuNPV-HB was greater than that of HycuNPV-BJ, and the killing speed of HycuNPV-HB was faster than that of HycuNPV-BJ. A comparison of molecular genetic characteristics indicated that the virulence differences between the two isolates were affected by SNP and structural variants, especially the homologous repeat regions. Conclusions The genomes of the two Chinese HycuNPV isolates were characterized, they belonged to a novel species of Alphabaculovirus that infected Hyphantria cunea in China. We inferred that the loss or gain of genetic material in the HycuNPV-HB and HycuNPV-BJ genomes resulted in new important adaptive capabilities to the H. cunea host. These results extend the current understanding of the genetic diversity of HycuNPV and will be useful for improving the applicability of this virus as a biological control agent.