A new chimeric Porcine Coronavirus strain found in swine feces collected in Germany 2012. Chimeric porcine Coronavirus found in Germany

Accompanying a study of recent PED cases in Germany caused by a new PEDV Indel strain (Hanke et al., 2014), we retrospectively analyzed fecal samples from pigs that showed typical clinical symptoms of a PEDV infection. The sample set included fecal material that was collected in 2012 in Southern Germany. This material was shown to contain coronavirus-like particles in electron microscopy (Fig. 1a) but was found negative in RT-PCR assays specific for the PEDV N gene. Subsequent metagenomic analyses resulted in the full-genome sequence of a coronavirus (SeCoV/GER/L00930/2012). In detail, we found a sequence showing high similarity (99.5 % identity) to the TGEV/PEDV recombinant presented by (Boniotti et al. 2016)