Isolation of genotype VII avian orthoavulavirus serotype 1 from barn owl from Northeast India.

Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) affects both commercial poultry as well as other avian species in the wild and in captivity. Although the diversity of NDV in domestic chickens has been well understood, little light has been shed on NDV outbreaks in other avian species. We provide an annotated sequence of NDV/Owl/Guwahati/01/20, a virulent strain of NDV isolated from Barn Owls in captivity from Guwahati in Northeast India. The complete genome is 15192 bases long with a fusion protein (F) cleavage site 112 KR Q KR ↓F117. The isolate showed 97.67% identity with its closest match, another highly virulent strain from Indonesia isolated from vaccinated commercial chickens; however, they differ in the F cleavage site. The NDV isolate from the owl shares 83.02% and 81.88% identity with the vaccine strains R2B and LaSota, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis with both F gene as well as whole-genome nucleotide sequence reveals that the NDV isolate from owl belongs to genotype VII, subgenotype VII.2 and differs significantly from any other isolate of NDV from India.