We isolated 4 Norwalk-like viruses (NLVs) contaminated oysters from 33 Chinese oysters collected from local commercial sources
of Shandong Province. After amplification of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) region of NLVs genomes with RT-PCR, the
open reading frame 1 (ORF1) of the RdRp was sequenced and subjected to multiple-sequence alignment. The results showed that
NLVs in the four isolates belong to genogroup II. The sequence comparison showed that the similarity between four Chinese
oyster isolates were higher than 99.0%, which indicated that NLVs prevalent in close areas have high homogeneity in genome
sequences. In addition, the most conserved sequences between diverse NLVs were used to design primers and TaqMan probes, then
the real-time quantitative PCR assay was performed. According to the standard curve of GII NLVs, the original amounts (copies)
of NLVs in positive patient’s fecal isolate, positive Japanese oyster isolate, and the Chinese oyster isolate were 8.9×10
8, 1.25×10
8 and 4.7×10
1 respectively. The detecting limit of NLVs was 1×10
1 copies. This study will be helpful for routine diagnosis of NLVs pathogens in foods and thus for avoiding food poisoning
in the future.
Key words oysters - Norwalk-like viruses (NLVs) - reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) - sequence analysis - real time quantitative PCR