Unraveling the mystery of Tacaribe virus.

Tacaribe virus (TCRV) was first isolated in the mid-1950s from several species bats in and around Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. Since that time, debate has persisted whether artibeus bats serve as reservoir hosts of the virus or whether infection of the bats was an incidental spillover event from another, unidentified reservoir host. Complicating the issue is that the only TCRV isolate routinely used, TRVL-11573, had been passaged in suckling mice and likely accumulated mutations that altered its biology. Recent fieldwork has now identified two distinct genomes of TCRV in apparently healthy artibeus bats sampled in Brazil and the Dominican Republic (C. Fischer, M. H. A. Cassiano, W. R. Thomas, L. M. Dávalos, et al., mSphere e00520-24, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1128/msphere.00520-24). Together, these works suggest that artibeus bats are natural reservoirs of TCRV and that the virus has a wide geographic distribution in the Americas.