P orcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) is a devastating enteric disease (1) caused by PED virus (PEDV), an RNA virus in the genus Alphacoronavirus, family Coronaviridae (2) . Presently, PEDV is posing a threat to the swine industry worldwide (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) . PED was first reported in England in 1971 (8) and has since been identified in many pig-raising countries, including European, American, and Asian countries (9) . In 2010, the largescale outbreaks of PED with high morbidity and mortality occurred in swine farms in China, resulting in huge economic losses (10, 11) .
In April 2017, a PEDV outbreak occurred in a farrow-to-finish herd in southern China. The mortality rate of the disease ranged from 10% in weaning pigs to 95% in neonatal piglets. PEDV was identified by an established reverse transcription-PCR with primers specific to the N gene of PEDV. Subsequently, the whole-genome sequence of one representative strain of PEDV, designated CH/JXJA/2017, was determined according to the previously reported methodology (12) , and the data were assembled and annotated by Lasergene version 7.10 (DNAStar, Inc., USA).
The (11) , and it had a nucleotide identity of 96.7% with the attenuated CV777 strain. Phylogenetic analysis based on the full-length genome sequences of PEDVs revealed that CH/JXJA/2017 belonged to genogroup 2 (G2). Interestingly, the CH/JXJA/2017 strain possessed two unique deletion and two insertion sites compared to the PEDV attenuated vaccine CV777 strain (nt 20811 to 20822, nt 21123 to 21128, nt 21054 to 21056, and nt 21105 to 21107) in the S gene, and one 4-amino-acid deletion ( 59 QGVN 62 ), one 2-amino-acid deletion ( 163 NI 164 ), and two single-amino-acid insertions ( 140 N and 157 H) were observed. Of note, the 4-amino-acid insertion site ( 59 QGVN 62 ) of CH/JXJA/2017 was in the S1 domain of the S protein, which was similar to CH/ZMDZY/ 11. These findings suggest that CH/JXJA/2017 was a novel PEDV variant. Further study is required to determine the biological properties of this novel variant of PEDV.
Accession number(s). The complete genome sequence of PEDV strain CH/JXJA/ 2017 has been deposited in GenBank under the accession number MF375374.