show Abstracthide AbstractKoi herpesvirus disease (KHVD) is an emerging disease that causes mass mortality in koi and common carp, Cyprinus carpio L. Its causative agent is Cyprinid herpesvirus 3 (CyHV-3), also known as koi herpesvirus (KHV). Although data on the pathogenesis of this deadly virus is relatively abundant in the literature, still little is known about its genomic diversity and about the molecular mechanisms that lead to such a high virulence. In this context, a specific enrichment procedure for sequencing full-length CyHV-3 genomes directly from tissues of infected fish was developed and evaluated. Full sequences from 8 specimens could be recovered from gill samples containing as little as 5,000 CyHV-3 copies, with a high depth (>100x) almost all along the genome. This should help shed new light on the evolution patterns and ways of spreading of this deadly virus.