A metagenomic survey of viral abundance and diversity in mosquitoes from Hubei province.

Chenyan Shi,Xiaomin Hu,Yi Liu,Jinfeng Xiong,Zhiming Yuan,Bo Zhang,Houssam Attoui

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129845

Abstract

Mosquitoes as one of the most common but important vectors have the potential to transmit or acquire a lot of viruses through biting, however viral flora in mosquitoes and its impact on mosquito-borne disease transmission has not been well investigated and evaluated. In this study, the metagenomic techniquehas been successfully employed in analyzing the abundance and diversity of viral community in three mosquito samples from Hubei, China. Among 92,304 reads produced through a run with 454 GS FLX system, 39% have high similarities with viral sequences belonging to identified bacterial, fungal, animal, plant and insect viruses, and 0.02% were classed into unidentified viral sequences, demonstrating high abundance and diversity of viruses in mosquitoes. Furthermore, two novel viruses in subfamily Densovirinae and family Dicistroviridae were identified, and six torque tenosus virus1 in family Anelloviridae, three porcine parvoviruses in subfamily Parvovirinae and a Culex tritaeniorhynchus rhabdovirus in Family Rhabdoviridae were preliminarily characterized. The viral metagenomic analysis offered us a deep insight into the viral population of mosquito which played an important role in viral initiative or passive transmission and evolution during the process.

Highlights

Mosquitoes are important insect vectors to transmit amount of known pathogenic viruses in Family Flavivirus and Alphavirus, such as Dengue virus (DENV), West Nile virus (WNV) and Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), which threaten the public health and gain considerable attention worldwide [1, 2]
The four species are the principal vectors of Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV) and Plasmodium vivax in Hubei
A total of 92,304 trimmed valid reads were generated after removing sequences shorter than 50 nt and the reads average length was 247 nt (Table 2). 39.2% viral sequences, identified by querying the viral database from NCBI running BLASTn and BLASTx at theEvalue cutoff of 0.01, had high similarities to a variety of different viruses (Table 2), with 3.6% of Sample I sample II Sample III

Summary

Introduction

Mosquitoes are important insect vectors to transmit amount of known pathogenic viruses in Family Flavivirus and Alphavirus, such as Dengue virus (DENV), West Nile virus (WNV) and Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), which threaten the public health and gain considerable attention worldwide [1, 2]. Viral metagenomic analysis was performed on mosquito samples collected in San Diego, USA to explore DNA virus population in them, reflecting a broad range of animal, plant, insect and bacterial viruses [5]. The abundance and diversity of viruses in three mosquito samples from Hubei, China, were analyzed by metagenomic sequencing.The novel mosquito densovirus and Big Sioux River virus were identified, and six torque teno sus virus 1, three porcine parvoviruses and a Culex tritaeniorhynchus rhabdovirus were characterized.

Results

Conclusion