Abstract
Ticks transmit a wide variety of pathogens including bacteria, parasites and viruses. Over the last decade, numerous novel viruses have been described in arthropods, including ticks, and their characterization has provided new insights into RNA virus diversity and evolution. However, little is known about their ability to infect vertebrates. As very few studies have described the diversity of viruses present in ticks from the Caribbean, we implemented an RNA-sequencing approach on Amblyomma variegatum and Rhipicephalus microplus ticks collected from cattle in Guadeloupe and Martinique. Among the viral communities infecting Caribbean ticks, we selected four viruses belonging to the Chuviridae, Phenuiviridae and Flaviviridae families for further characterization and designing antibody screening tests. While viral prevalence in individual tick samples revealed high infection rates, suggesting a high level of exposure of Caribbean cattle to these viruses, no seropositive animals were detected. These results suggest that the Chuviridae- and Phenuiviridae-related viruses identified in the present study are more likely tick endosymbionts, raising the question of the epidemiological significance of their occurrence in ticks, especially regarding their possible impact on tick biology and vector capacity. The characterization of these viruses might open the door to new ways of preventing and controlling tick-borne diseases.
Highlights
Ticks harbor a wide variety of microorganisms, such as nematodes, fungi, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses [1,2]
The RNAseq analysis of the pools of RNA extracted from 578 ticks, including 132 Amblyomma variegatum and 446 Rhipicephalus microplus collected in Guadeloupe and Martinique, provided 41,696,475 paired-end reads, generating 28,565 contigs and 1,188,734 singletons, after trimming and assembly
Among the Flaviviridae, the only viral genome detected was related to Mogiana tick virus, a tick-associated Jingmen virus primarily described in Rhipicephalus microplus ticks from
Summary
Ticks harbor a wide variety of microorganisms, such as nematodes, fungi, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses [1,2]. About 160 arboviruses have been identified in ticks, with around 25%. Viruses 2020, 12, 144 of them associated with human and/or animal diseases [3]. Arboviruses are usually grouped into nine viral families: one family of DNA viruses, Asfarviridae, and eight families of RNA viruses, Flaviviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, Reoviridae, Rhabdoviridae, Nyamiviridae, Nairoviridae, Phenuiviridae, and Peribunyaviridae [3]. Studies on tick-borne viruses have mainly focused on arboviruses that are able to affect both the invertebrate and vertebrate host, and that are responsible for important human or animal diseases worldwide [3,4]. New viruses have been described worldwide in various arthropods, revealing highly variable genomic structures and genetic organization, defining new viral families, and revealing complex evolutionary links with the known arbovirus families and genera [7,10,11,12]
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