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Dear Editor,rnAfrican swine fever(ASF)is a severe haemorrhagic fever in domestic pigs and wild boar with extremely high mor-tality rate.It is cataloged as a notifiable disease by the World Organization for Animal Health(OIE).The etio?logical agent that causes the highly lethal disease is the African swine fever virus(ASFV)(Sanchez-Vizcaino et al.2015).ASFV is the only known member of the genus Asfivirus and family Asfarviridae.The family Asfarviridae belongs to the member of nucleocytoplasmic large DNA viruses(NCLDV)superfamily(Iyer et al.2006;Costard et al.2009).Overall,the ASFV virion presents an icosa-hedral morphology with a multilayered structure(Wang et al.2019).The genome of ASFV is a large double-stranded DNA(dsDNA)molecule that varies in length from about 170 to 193 kilobase pairs and encodes between 150 and 167 open reading frames(ORFs)depending on the isolate(Dixon et al.2013).In addition,ASFV also infects African wild suids,including warthogs(Phacochoerus africanus)and bushpigs(Potamochoerus larvatus),which act as asymptomatic carriers.Soft ticks of the Ornithodoros moubata complex also serve as a natural reservoir and transmit the disease to suids.In East Africa,ASFV is maintained in an ancient sylvatic cycle involving warthogs and soft ticks(Ornithodoros genus)that inhabit their bur-rows(Jori et al.2013).