Abstract

Bovine papillomatosis is a benign, self-limiting tumor in cattle that is caused by a wide diverse of bovine papillomaviruses (BPVs 1-23). The disease is of high economic importance to the beef and hide industries in Nigeria. To date, there is no information on the molecular characterization of BPVs in Nigeria. Consequently, we collected cutaneous wart lesions from 31 cows in Ibadan, Nigeria and screened them for BPV using a degenerate primer that amplify partial L1 gene sequence of the virus in PCR. Six samples (19.4%) were positive for bovine papillomavirus. Thereafter, amplicons were purified and sequenced. BLAST search, pairwise sequence alignments, pairwise genetic distance calculations, multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic analysis revealed the viruses to be bovine papillomavirus-1 belonging to the genus Deltapapillomavirus.

Key words: Cattle; Cutaneous warts; Bovine papillomavirus-1; Polymerase Chain Reaction; Nigeria.