Bovine coronavirus
Bovine coronavirus (BCV or BCoV) is a coronavirus which is a member of the species Betacoronavirus 1. The infecting virus is an enveloped, positive-sense, single-stranded RNA virus which enters its host cell by binding to the N-acetyl-9-O-acetylneuraminic acid recepter. Infection causes calf enteritis and contributes to the enzootic pneumonia complex in calves. It can also cause winter dysentery in adult cattle. It can infect both domestic and wild ruminants and has a worldwide distribution. Transmission is horizontal, via oro-fecal or respiratory routes. Like other coronaviruses from genus Betacoronavirus, subgenus Embecovirus, it has a surface protein called hemagglutinin esterase (HE) in addition to the four structural proteins shared by all coronaviruses (spike, membrane, nucleocapsid, and envelope proteins). Virology BCoV has 95% similarity with human coronavirus OC43 and 93% to porcine hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis virus. According to a 2006 study, those three strains may have diverged during the 19th century, while all circulating BCoV lineages had a most recent common ancestor around 1940s, with all earlier bovine lineages extinct. An earlier article by the same authors compared BCoV and HCoV-OC43, and several methods yielded most probable divergence dates around 1890, leading authors to speculate that an introduction of the former strain to the