Distinguishing features

Infections by members of this genus cause true papillomas on the cutaneous or mucosal surfaces of ungulates. Most members of this genus do not encode an E6 protein. All viruses in this genus express an E10 protein from part of the genome typically occupied by E6. The E10 protein displays transforming properties.

Virion

See discussion under family description. 

Genome organization and replication

See discussion under family description.

Antigenicity

See discussion under family description.

Biology

See discussion under family description.

Species demarcation criteria

Putative novel papillomavirus genome with complete genome sequence data available and that is <70% related to papillomaviruses within the genus (Figure 1.Xipapillomavirus).

Figure 1.Xipapillomavirus. Phylogenetic tree of members of the genus Xipapillomavirus. The E1, E2, L2, and L1 nucleotide sequences of 343 papillomavirus isolates including representatives of all species and genera within the Papillomaviridae family were aligned as amino acid sequences using MUSCLE v7.221 (Edgar 2004). JModeltest2 (Darriba et al., 2012) was used to determine the optimal model of evolution (GTR + I + G) for the concatenated nucleotide sequences. Maximum likelihood (ML) trees were constructed using RAxML MPI v8.2.9 (Stamatakis 2006) implementing the GTR substitution model. ML bootstrap analysis used the autoMRE-based stopping criterion in RAxML. Following tree construction (tree available in the Resources section of the Papillomaviridae Report), the subtree corresponding to the genus Xipapillomavirus was isolated. Tips are labelled with virus names and accession numbers; nodes are labelled with bootstrap support values.

Member species

Virus names, the choice of exemplar isolates, and virus abbreviations, are not official ICTV designations.