Systematic Biological Analysis on the Complete Genome Sequences of 35 Strains of African Swine Fever Virus

African Swine Fever (ASF) is a severe infectious disease caused by the African Swine Fever Virus (ASFV). The ticks and wild boars are the main natural hosts. The infection of ASFV can cause the direct death of domestic pigs and wild boars, with the death rate of nearly 100%. At present, the widespread outbreaks have occurred in Africa, Europe and Asia, but there was no commercial vaccine to prevent the virus. Therefore, a deeper understanding of viral genomic information was required. Through the multi-sequence alignment, the construction of phylogenetic tree, the detection of conserved region of ASFV whole genomes occurring in different regions, the gene fragments related to the virulence and evolution of ASFV were obtained, and then the relationship between these gene fragments in virus strains from different regions was also studied. The results showed that compared with the genotype Ⅶ, the genotype Ⅱ showed many increases in large fragment of gene sequence, most of which were found in the multigene family of V110, 360 and 505/530. Among them, the analysis of MGF 505/530-7R and MGF 360-1L genes in the multigene family showed that the differences of these genes among different genotypes would affect the survival ability of macrophages and the strength of virus replication was related to the variation and evolution of viruses. The results provided a new direction for the study of the evolution of viruses and the development of virus vaccines in the future.