Genome sequencing of African ASFV isolates

African swine fever virus causes a severe disease of domestic pigs and Eurasian wild boar that is typically fatal. An outbreak of a single strain of African swine fever in Georgia in 2007 has led to the spread of the disease across Europe and Asia and has caused outbreaks in the Americas and Oceania. While the biological properties of Eurasian isolates of African swine fever virus have been well characterised, the virus exhibits significant diversity within Africa that has not well characterised beyond case reports and sequencing of short regions of the genome. Sequencing of the three orune end of the B646L gene that encodes for the major capsid protein p72 has led to the categorisation of African swine fever virus into 23 genotypes, all of which are present in Africa south of the Sahara. Here we present the full genome sequences of 18 African swine fever virus isolates, including data for seven genotypes for which no full genome sequence is currently available.