Sjodin Anna R, Willig Michael R, Rodríguez-Durán Armando, Anthony Simon J
Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology University of Connecticut Storrs Connecticut USA.
Center for Environmental Sciences & Engineering and Institute of the Environment University of Connecticut Storrs Connecticut USA.
Ecol Evol. 2024 Jun 17;14(6):e11501. doi: 10.1002/ece3.11501. eCollection 2024 Jun.
Public health concerns about recent viral epidemics have motivated researchers to seek novel ways to understand pathogen infection in native, wildlife hosts. With its deep history of tools and perspectives for understanding the abundance and distribution of organisms, ecology can shed new light on viral infection dynamics. However, datasets allowing deep explorations of viral communities from an ecological perspective are lacking. We sampled 1086 bats from two, adjacent Puerto Rican caves and tested them for infection by herpesviruses, resulting in 3131 short, viral sequences. Using percent identity of nucleotides and a machine learning algorithm (affinity propagation), we categorized herpesviruses into 43 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) to be used in place of species in subsequent ecological analyses. Herpesvirus metacommunities demonstrated long-tailed rank frequency distributions at all analyzed levels of host organization (i.e., individual, population, and community). Although 13 herpesvirus OTUs were detected in more than one host species, OTUs generally exhibited host specificity by infecting a single core host species at a significantly higher prevalence than in all satellite species combined. We describe the natural history of herpesvirus metacommunities in Puerto Rican bats and suggest that viruses follow the general law that communities comprise few common and many rare species. To guide future efforts in the field of viral ecology, hypotheses are presented regarding mechanisms that contribute to these patterns.
近期病毒流行引发的公共卫生问题促使研究人员寻找新方法，以了解本土野生动物宿主中的病原体感染情况。生态学在理解生物的丰度和分布方面有着悠久的工具和视角历史，它能为病毒感染动态提供新的见解。然而，目前缺乏从生态学角度深入探索病毒群落的数据集。我们从波多黎各相邻的两个洞穴中采集了1086只蝙蝠样本，并检测它们是否感染疱疹病毒，共获得3131条短病毒序列。利用核苷酸的百分比同一性和一种机器学习算法（亲和传播），我们将疱疹病毒分类为43个操作分类单元（OTU），以便在后续的生态分析中替代物种使用。疱疹病毒集合群落在宿主组织的所有分析层面（即个体、种群和群落）都呈现出长尾秩频分布。虽然在不止一种宿主物种中检测到了13个疱疹病毒OTU，但OTU通常表现出宿主特异性，即感染单一核心宿主物种的患病率显著高于所有卫星物种的总和。我们描述了波多黎各蝙蝠中疱疹病毒集合群落的自然史，并表明病毒遵循群落由少数常见物种和许多稀有物种组成的一般规律。为指导病毒生态学领域未来的研究工作，我们提出了关于促成这些模式的机制的假设。
