Mammarenaviruses cause a persistent infection in their natural rodent and bat hosts. Reptarenaviruses cause boid inclusion body disease (BIBD) in constrictor snakes, but it is unclear whether snakes are the natural host of these viruses.

Boid inclusion body disease (BIBD) caused by reptarenaviruses affects collections of captive constrictor snakes worldwide. The disease manifests by formation of cytoplasmic inclusion bodies (IBs) in various tissues. Curiously, a snake with BIBD most often carries more than a single pair of genetically distinct reptarenavirus S and L segments, and the tissues of an infected individual can show variation in the variety of different S and L segment species. The role of reptarenavirus coinfection in development of BIBD remains unknown, and it is unclear how the infection affects the susceptibility to reptarenavirus superinfection or to secondary infection by other agents. Because cell culture studies with mammarenaviruses have demonstrated persistently infected cultures to resist superinfection by genetically similar viruses, we hypothesized that coinfection would only occur if the infecting viruses were of two different species. To study the hypothesis, we employed boa constrictor kidney- and brain-derived cell cultures to perform a set of co- and superinfection experiments with five reptarenavirus and one hartmanivirus isolates. Analysis of viral RNA released from coinfected cells using qRT-PCR did not demonstrate evident competition between reptarenaviruses of the same or different species in the boa constrictor kidney-derived cell line. The experiments on the brain-derived cell line revealed considerable differences in the replication ability of the reptarenaviruses tested, suggesting varying tissue specificity or target cell spectra for reptarenavirus species. Finally, experiments on persistently reptarenavirus infected cell lines showed reduced replication of closely related reptarenaviruses while the replication of reptarenaviruses from different species appeared unaffected.