Öhlund Pontus, Lundén Hanna, Blomström Anne-Lie
Section of Virology, Department of Biomedical Sciences and Veterinary Public Health, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7028, 750 07, Uppsala, Sweden.
Virus Genes. 2019 Apr;55(2):127-137. doi: 10.1007/s11262-018-01629-9. Epub 2019 Jan 10.
The advancement in high-throughput sequencing technology and bioinformatics tools has spurred a new age of viral discovery. Arthropods is the largest group of animals and has shown to be a major reservoir of different viruses, including a group known as insect-specific viruses (ISVs). The majority of known ISVs have been isolated from mosquitoes and shown to belong to viral families associated with animal arbovirus pathogens, such as Flaviviridae, Togaviridae and Phenuiviridae. These insect-specific viruses have a strict tropism and are unable to replicate in vertebrate cells, these properties are interesting for many reasons. One is that these viruses could potentially be utilised as biocontrol agents using a similar strategy as for Wolbachia. Mosquitoes infected with the viral agent could have inferior vectorial capacity of arboviruses resulting in a decrease of circulating arboviruses of public health importance. Moreover, insect-specific viruses are thought to be ancestral to arboviruses and could be used to study the evolution of the switch from single-host to dual-host. In this review, we discuss new discoveries and hypothesis in the field of arboviruses and insect-specific viruses.
高通量测序技术和生物信息学工具的进步开启了病毒发现的新时代。节肢动物是最大的动物类群，已被证明是不同病毒的主要储存宿主，包括一类被称为昆虫特异性病毒（ISV）的病毒。大多数已知的昆虫特异性病毒是从蚊子中分离出来的，并已证明属于与动物虫媒病毒病原体相关的病毒科，如黄病毒科、披膜病毒科和白蛉病毒科。这些昆虫特异性病毒具有严格的嗜性，无法在脊椎动物细胞中复制，这些特性因多种原因而备受关注。其中一个原因是，这些病毒有可能像利用沃尔巴克氏体一样，被用作生物防治剂。感染病毒制剂的蚊子传播虫媒病毒的能力可能会下降，从而导致具有公共卫生重要性的虫媒病毒传播减少。此外，昆虫特异性病毒被认为是虫媒病毒的祖先，可用于研究从单宿主到双宿主转变的进化过程。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了虫媒病毒和昆虫特异性病毒领域的新发现和假说。
