Abstract
Monitoring wildlife infectious agents requires acquiring samples suitable for analyses, which is often logistically demanding. A possible alternative to invasive or non-invasive sampling of wild-living vertebrates is the use of vertebrate material contained in invertebrates feeding on them, their feces, or their remains. Carrion flies have been shown to contain vertebrate DNA; here we investigate whether they might also be suitable for wildlife pathogen detection. We collected 498 flies in Taï National Park, Côte d’Ivoire, a tropical rainforest and examined them for adenoviruses (family Adenoviridae), whose DNA is frequently shed in feces of local mammals. Adenoviral DNA was detected in 6/142 mammal-positive flies. Phylogenetic analyses revealed that five of these sequences were closely related to sequences obtained from local non-human primates, while the sixth sequence was closely related to a murine adenovirus. Next-generation sequencing-based DNA-profiling of the meals of the respective flies identified putative hosts that were a good fit to those suggested by adenoviral sequence affinities. We conclude that, while characterizing the genetic diversity of wildlife infectious agents through fly-based monitoring may not be cost-efficient, this method could probably be used to detect the genetic material of wildlife infectious agents causing wildlife mass mortality in pristine areas.
Highlights
The recent epidemic of Ebola virus in West Africa has again shown the relevance of emerging infectious diseases (EID) for global public health and economies[1,2]
Blood meals of many hematophagous arthropods have been demonstrated to contain DNA from their vertebrate hosts and the pathogens for which they act as vectors, i.e. malaria in birds[11]
A BLAST search revealed that four of the six sequences were ≥98% identical to a simian AdV sequence determined from a mona monkey (Cercopithecus campbelli, KP274048) in Côte d’Ivoire (Fly 92, Fly 101, Fly 740, Fly 1355)[26]
Summary
The recent epidemic of Ebola virus in West Africa has again shown the relevance of emerging infectious diseases (EID) for global public health and economies[1,2]. Emergence is likely facilitated by increased contact of humans and domestic animals with wildlife combined with insufficient access to health care[4] It is most intense in resource-poor tropical regions, such as those in Central and West Africa where the Ebola virus repeatedly emerged[3,5]. Nucleic acids of vertebrate-infecting microorganisms exhibiting a variety of tissue tropisms have already been recovered from fecal samples[8,9,10] These methods come with some disadvantages: they incur additional organizational costs, e.g. extra staff often needs to be recruited and trained, they are labor-intensive and they exclude candidate reservoir species for which fecal sampling is impractical or impossible, e.g. wild rodents. Blood-sucking arthropods often exhibit strong host preferences, which may be suboptimal when the objective is to survey infectious agent diversity in complex ecosystems with high biodiversity
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