Family: Kolmioviridae

Genus: Daletvirus

Distinguishing features

Swiss snake colony virus 1 (SwSCV1) is the only classified daletvirus. Daletviruses infect boid snakes (Hetzel et al., 2019). In vitro, hartmanivirus and reptarenaviruses (Negarnaviricota: Bunyavirales: Arenaviridae) serve as helper viruses (Szirovicza et al., 2020).

Virion

Virions are unknown.

Physicochemical and physical properties

Not reported.

Nucleic acid

Daletviruses have non-segmented, covalently-closed, circular negative-sense RNA genomes (cccRNA) of about 1.7 kb with 53.3% GC content (Hetzel et al., 2019).

Proteins

Daletviruses are predicted to express one delta antigen (Dag)-like protein of 199 amino-acid residues (Hetzel et al., 2019).

Biology

SwSCV1 was discovered in a boa constrictor (boid Boa constrictor Linnaeus, 1758) and also detected in a Savu python (pythonid Liasis mackloti savuensis Stull, 1932), both sampled in Switzerland (Hetzel et al., 2019).

Species demarcation criteria

The genus currently only includes a single species.