| Summary: | African swine fever (ASF) is a lethal disease of domestic pigs that is currently challenging swine production in large areas of Eurasia and the Caribbean. The causative agent, ASF virus (ASFV), is a large, double-stranded, and structurally complex virus. The ASFV genome encodes for more than 160 proteins; however, the functions of most of them are still in the process of being characterized. Recently, ASFV gene <i>I196L</i> has been reported as being critically involved in disease production in domestic pigs. We report here that a recombinant virus derived from the Georgia 2010 isolate (ASFV-G) lacking the <i>I196L</i> gene, ASFV-G-∆I196L, had the same ability to replicate in primary cultures of swine macrophage and, when experimentally inoculated in pigs, produced a fatal form of the disease similar to that caused by the parental virulent ASFV-G. Therefore, deletion of the <i>I196L</i> gene does not significantly affect virus replication and virulence in domestic pigs of the ASFV Georgia 2010 isolate.
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