Genomic Mining Reveals Deep Evolutionary Relationships between Bornaviruses and Bats
Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore 169857, Singapore
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Academic Editors: Johnson Mak, Peter Walker and Marcus Thomas Gilbert
Viruses 2015, 7(11), 5792-5800; https://doi.org/10.3390/v7112906
Received: 21 July 2015 / Revised: 5 October 2015 / Accepted: 3 November 2015 / Published: 10 November 2015
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Next Generation Sequencing: New Developments and Discoveries in Virology)
Bats globally harbor viruses in order Mononegavirales, such as lyssaviruses and henipaviruses; however, little is known about their relationships with bornaviruses. Previous studies showed that viral fossils of bornaviral origin are embedded in the genomes of several mammalian species such as primates, indicative of an ancient origin of exogenous bornaviruses. In this study, we mined the available 10 bat genomes and recreated a clear evolutionary relationship of endogenous bornaviral elements and bats. Comparative genomics showed that endogenization of bornaviral elements frequently occurred in vesper bats, harboring EBLLs (endogenous bornavirus-like L elements) in their genomes. Molecular dating uncovered a continuous bornavirus-bat interaction spanning 70 million years. We conclude that better understanding of modern exogenous bornaviral circulation in bat populations is warranted.
Keywords:
genomic mining; endogenous bornaviruses; bats; virus-host interaction