Assessment of the virulence of an infectious porcine epidemic diarrhea virus generated from synthesized DNA

Recent detection of chimeric viruses consisting of a TGEV genomic backbone with a spike gene region originating from PEDV in Europe demonstrate that TGEV and PEDV can recombine in the field. We thus generated a chimeric virus based on a genomic backbone of the highly pathogenic PEDV Minnesota strain (KF468752) and the spike gene originating from TGEV Purdue (DQ811789.2) to test whether such viruses have a highly pathogenic phenotype.