Abstract
African swine fever is a lethal disease of domestic pigs, geographically expanding as a pandemic, that is affecting countries across Eurasia and severely damaging their swine production industry. After more than 40 years of being absent in the Western hemisphere, in 2020 ASF reappeared in the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The recent outbreak strain in the Dominican Republic has been identified as a genotype II ASFV a derivative of the ASF strain circulating in Asia and Europe. However, to date no full-length genome sequence from either the 1978-1980 Here we report the complete genome sequence of an African swine fever virus (ASFV) (DR-1980) that was previously isolated from blood collected in 1980 from the Dominican Republic at the end of the last outbreak, before culling of all swine on the island of Hispaniola and stored in the Plum Island Animal Disease Center ASFV repository. A contig representing the full-length genome (183,687 base pairs) was de novo assembled into a single contig using both Nanopore and Illumina sequences. DR-1980 was determined to belong to genotype I and, as determined by full genome comparison, a close relative to the sequenced Sardinia viruses that were causing outbreaks at this time.