Abstract
During 2019, five carcasses of juvenile Egyptian fruit bats (Rousettus aegyptiacus) were submitted to the Kimron Veterinary Institute. These bats exhibited typical poxvirus like lesion plaques of different sizes on the skin, abdomen and the ventral side of the wings. Clinical and histopathological findings suggested a poxvirus infection. Infectious virus was isolated from skin swabs, skin tissue and tongue of the dead bats and was further confirmed to be a Poxvirus by molecular diagnosis using PCR with pan-chordopoxviruses primers. All the dead bats were found positive for two Poxvirus genes encoding a metalloproteinase and DNA dependent DNA polymerase. In this study, a novel real time quantitative PCR (qPCR) assay was established to further confirmed the presence of specific poxvirus viral DNA in all pathologically tested tissues. Moreover, according to sequence analysis, the virus was found to be highly similar to the recently discovered Israeli Rousettus aegyptiacus Pox Virus (IsrRAPXV).
Highlights
Bats make approximately 20% of living mammals and are extremely disperse species, found in all continents except Antarctica [1,2]
Bats are considered the natural reservoir of a large variety of zoonotic viruses including henipaviruses [4], filoviruses [5], some lyssaviruses [6], SARS-CoV [7], Middle East Respiratory Syndrome [8] and SARS-CoV-2 [9]
We reported the identification of a previously unrecognized poxvirus-IsrRAPXV, which we found to be involved with a clinical disease of the skin of adult Egyptian fruit bats in Israel [15]
Summary
Bats make approximately 20% of living mammals and are extremely disperse species, found in all continents except Antarctica [1,2]. As true for other bats species, Egyptian fruit bats can harbor many different viruses without showing clinical signs and are the natural reservoir for the Marburg [5] and Sosuga viruses [11]. Poxviruses are double-stranded DNA viruses with relatively large genome (150–300 kbp). Poxviruses were found to be involved in different diseases in bats [13,14] including the recent reports suggesting the association of poxvirus with a clinical disease of the skin in infected bats [15,16]. We reported the identification of a previously unrecognized poxvirus-IsrRAPXV, which we found to be involved with a clinical disease of the skin of adult Egyptian fruit bats in Israel [15]. We describe the clinical and pathological findings of juvenile Egyptian fruit bats infected with poxvirus like -IsrRAPXV. We describe a novel qPCR assay for detection of IsrRAPXV in target tissues
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