Meeting Abstract
Avian keratin disorder (AKD), a disease characterized by debilitating beak overgrowth but with unknown etiology, has increasingly affected wild bird populations since the 1990s. A previous study showed that a novel picornavirus, poecivirus, is closely correlated with disease status in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) in Alaska. While the presence of poecivirus has been well documented in black-capped chickadees, the relationship between poecivirus and beak deformities in other species and elsewhere remains unresolved. We investigate the presence of poecivirus in nine individuals from seven different bird species with elongated beaks consistent with AKD that were sampled from Alaska, Washington, and Maine (red-breasted nuthatch, northwestern crow, blackpoll warbler, mew gull, black-billed magpie, hairy woodpecker, red-tailed hawk). We used targeted PCR followed by Sanger sequencing to test for the presence of poecivirus in each individual, and to obtain viral genome sequence from virus positive host individuals. We detected poecivirus in the beak or cloaca of all tested individuals, and obtained the complete coding region of poecivirus from a red-breasted nuthatch. This study has demonstrated that poecivirus is present in deformed individuals of seven additional species of wild birds, strengthening the correlation between poecivirus and AKD, and providing further support for poecivirus as a candidate agent of AKD across North America.
