The study commissioned by the Catalan government rules out that the African swine fever outbreak originated at IRTA: "It's a strain that has never been found before."
The sequencing carried out by the IRB, parallel to the official study, concludes that the Collserola variant does not match any known sample.
BarcelonaThe theory that the African swine fever (ASF) outbreak could have originated from the IRTA-Cresa laboratory in Collserola is losing steam. This Tuesday, the Catalan government announced that the analysis it requested from the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) found no match between the virus strain that infected the first wild boars with ASF in Collserola and the various virus samples used in the Catalan laboratory. Specifically, the IRB sequenced 17 ASF virus samples that IRTA-Cresa has worked with in recent years and concluded that none of these samples matched the sequencing performed by the European reference laboratory on virus strain samples taken from the two infected wild boars.
"According to the information we have today, pending official confirmation from the Ministry, the IRB sequencing tells us that the wild boar samples [infected with ASF] do not match those from Cresa," announced the Minister of Agriculture, Oscar Ordeig. However, the Minister urged "caution," since the IRB study is an external study commissioned by the Catalan government and has been carried out in parallel with the work being done at the reference laboratory in Madrid, whose results will be officially validated. Nevertheless, Ordeig praised the IRB's work: "We are providing information from the best biomedical center we have, which is capable of doing this work," he insisted.
A new strain
Beyond the comparison with IRTA samples, the IRB has pointed out that the sequencing of the virus found in the dead wild boars also does not match any of the 800 African swine fever (ASF) genomic sequences that exist in public databases worldwide. "It is a strain that has never been found before; it is a new variant of the virus that has not been described until now," stated ICREA research professor jointly affiliated with the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB) and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), and director of the Comparative Genomics group, Toni Gabaldón. The IRB's results come after the Ministry of Agriculture confirmed two new cases of wild boars dying from African swine fever on Monday, bringing the total number of positive cases to 29. The two specimens were found within the first 6 km radius of Collserola, the area considered high-risk.
