Abstract
Bats are reservoir animals harboring many important pathogenic viruses and with the capability of transmitting these to humans and other animals. To establish an effective surveillance to monitor transboundary spread of bat viruses between Myanmar and China, complete organs from the thorax and abdomen from 853 bats of six species from two Myanmar counties close to Yunnan province, China, were collected and tested for their virome through metagenomics by Solexa sequencing and bioinformatic analysis. In total, 3,742,314 reads of 114 bases were generated, and over 86% were assembled into 1,649,512 contigs with an average length of 114 bp, of which 26,698 (2%) contigs were recognizable viral sequences belonging to 24 viral families. Of the viral contigs 45% (12,086/26,698) were related to vertebrate viruses, 28% (7,443/26,698) to insect viruses, 27% (7,074/26,698) to phages and 95 contigs to plant viruses. The metagenomic results were confirmed by PCR of selected viruses in all bat samples followed by phylogenetic analysis, which has led to the discovery of some novel bat viruses of the genera Mamastrovirus, Bocavirus, Circovirus, Iflavirus and Orthohepadnavirus and to their prevalence rates in two bat species. In conclusion, the present study aims to present the bat virome in Myanmar, and the results obtained further expand the spectrum of viruses harbored by bats.
Highlights
Bats, comprising the second largest mammalian population in the world and distributed globally with the exception of the two polar areas, belong to the order Chiroptera with 17 families and 925 species [1]
Miniopterus fuliginosus (M. fuliginosus), Hipposideros armiger (H. armiger), Rhinolophus ferrumequinum (R. ferrumequinum), Myotis chinensis (M. chinensis), Megaderma lyra (M. lyra) and Hipposideros fulvus (H. fulvus) species, were purchased in October and December, 2008, from Burmese living in border areas of Myanmar adjoining Yunnan province
The results summarized in table 3 show that the virome of the bats in the study comprised viruses of vertebrates, insects, plants and bacteria, with vertebrate virus-like contigs as the predominant sequences accounting for 45% (12,086/26,698)
Summary
Bats, comprising the second largest mammalian population in the world and distributed globally with the exception of the two polar areas, belong to the order Chiroptera with 17 families and 925 species [1]. Bats are important virus reservoir animals and more than 60 viruses have been identified in them with many highly pathogenic to humans [2], including henipaviruses, Ebola virus, Marburg virus, dengue virus, lyssaviruses and SARS-like coronavirus [3,4,5,6,7]. In China, viruses are increasingly being detected in, or isolated from bats, such as coronavirus, circovirus, astrovirus, Xi River virus, Japanese encephalitis virus (JEV), Chikungunya virus, Tuhoko virus, picornavirus, adeno-associated virus and adenovirus [5,9,14,16,17,18,19,20,21,22]. All available studies so far fail to provide a complete understanding of the pathogen ecology of bat populations
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