Department of Entomology, National Taiwan University, No 27 Lane 113 Sec 4 Roosevelt Rd, Taipei 10617, Taiwan.
Department of Entomology, University of California, Davis, 1 Shields Ave, Davis CA 95616, USA.
Virus Res. 2021 Feb;293:198263. doi: 10.1016/j.virusres.2020.198263. Epub 2020 Dec 24.
Deformed wing virus (DWV) is a single-stranded positive sense RNA virus that mainly infects honey bees (Apis mellifera) and can have devastating impacts on the colony. Recent studies have shown the presence of this virus in several species of Apis spp. and some other Hymenoptera, but our knowledge of their host range is very limited. We screened previously sequenced RNAseq libraries from different tissues of Vietnamese Walking Stick, Medauroidea extradentata (Phasmatodea) for DWV. We only found this virus in six libraries from anterior and posterior midgut tissue. From the midgut libraries we were able to construct a complete DWV genome sequence, which consisted of 10,140 nucleotides and included one open reading frame. Pairwise genome comparison confirmed strong similarity (98.89 %) of these assembled sequences with only 113 SNPs to the original DWV genome. We hypothesize the M. extradentata acquired this virus via a foodborne transmission by consuming DWV-infected material such as pollen or leaves contaminated with virus infected bee faeces.
变形翅膀病毒（DWV）是一种单链正链 RNA 病毒，主要感染蜜蜂（Apis mellifera），对蜂群可能产生毁灭性的影响。最近的研究表明，这种病毒存在于几种 Apis spp. 和一些其他膜翅目昆虫中，但我们对其宿主范围的了解非常有限。我们从越南步行虫（Phasmatodea）的不同组织中筛选了之前测序的 RNAseq 文库，以寻找 DWV。我们只在来自中肠组织的前肠和后肠组织的 6 个文库中发现了这种病毒。从中肠文库中，我们构建了一个完整的 DWV 基因组序列，该序列由 10140 个核苷酸组成，包括一个开放阅读框。基因组序列比对证实了这些组装序列与原始 DWV 基因组具有高度相似性（98.89%），仅存在 113 个 SNP。我们假设，M. extradentata 通过食用受 DWV 感染的花粉或叶片等物质，或食用受病毒感染的蜜蜂粪便污染的物质，经食物传播获得了这种病毒。
