Virology Unit, Institut Pasteur du Cambodge, Institut Pasteur International Network, Phnom Penh 12201, Cambodia.
Viral Hemorrhagic Fevers Research Unit, Shanghai Institute of Immunity and Infection, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China.
Acta Trop. 2024 Nov;259:107375. doi: 10.1016/j.actatropica.2024.107375. Epub 2024 Sep 1.
Blood feeding ectoparasites of bats have been found to contain insect-specific and vertebrate-infecting viruses of agricultural and medical importance. While it is plausible that some of these are of bat origin, those would be sourced either from the bat exterior or their blood meal. Bats, in addition to their regular diets, consume numerous ectoparasites during grooming. All microbes on and in the ectoparasites would then be introduced into the bat gut upon ingestion of the ectoparasites. To investigate the potential impact of bat ectoparasite viromes on the gut viral microbiome of bats, we compared virus sequences from bats and their blood feeding ectoparasites collected from Yunnan Province, China. Although all the co-occurring viruses were bacteriophages, we observed that bats contained a larger set of viruses than their ectoparasites, and that the set of predicted viruses present in the bats were more diverse than those present in bat ectoparasites. Our analysis suggests that despite a heavy influx of ectoparasites into the digestive tract of bats through consumption, there are only few co-occurring/shared viruses between bats and their ectoparasites, and that these ectoparasites may not be a major driver of bat virome diversity. Our findings provide necessary preliminary data for the evaluation of bat ectoparasites as a potential source of bat infecting viruses.
血液寄生虫是蝙蝠的外寄生虫，已被发现含有昆虫特异性和脊椎动物感染性病毒，这些病毒对农业和医学都很重要。虽然其中一些可能源自蝙蝠，但这些病毒要么来自蝙蝠外部，要么来自它们的吸血。蝙蝠除了正常的饮食外，在梳理时还会消耗大量的外寄生虫。所有在外寄生虫上和内的微生物，在吞食外寄生虫时都会被引入蝙蝠的肠道。为了研究蝙蝠外寄生虫病毒组对蝙蝠肠道病毒组的潜在影响，我们比较了来自中国云南省的蝙蝠及其吸血外寄生虫的病毒序列。尽管所有共存的病毒都是噬菌体，但我们观察到蝙蝠体内的病毒种类比外寄生虫多，而且蝙蝠体内预测的病毒种类比外寄生虫体内的更丰富。我们的分析表明，尽管蝙蝠通过食用大量的外寄生虫进入消化道，但蝙蝠与其外寄生虫之间只有少数共存/共享病毒，而且这些外寄生虫可能不是蝙蝠病毒组多样性的主要驱动因素。我们的研究结果为评估蝙蝠外寄生虫作为蝙蝠感染病毒的潜在来源提供了必要的初步数据。
