A Multicomponent Animal Virus Isolated from Mosquitoes

Abstract

SUMMARY RNA viruses exhibit a variety of genome organization strategies, including multicomponent genomes in which each segment is packaged separately. While multicomponent genomes are common among viruses infecting plants and fungi, their prevalence among those infecting animals remains unclear. We characterize a multicomponent RNA virus isolated from mosquitoes, designated Guaico Culex virus (GCXV). GCXV belongs to a diverse clade of segmented viruses (Jingmenvirus) related to the prototypically unsegmented Flaviviridae. The GCXV genome comprises five segments, each of which appears to be separately packaged. The smallest segment is not required for replication, and its presence is variable in natural infections. We also describe a variant of Jingmen tick virus, another Jingmenvirus, sequenced from a Ugandan red colobus monkey, thus expanding the host range of this segmented and likely multicomponent virus group. Collectively, this study provides evidence for the existence of multicomponent animal viruses and their potential relevance for animal and human health.

Novel Viruses Isolated from Mosquitoes in Pantanal, Brazil

“…We report here the first Brazilian detections of GCXV, a recently described multicomponent Jingmenvirus (5). The five genomic segments from Culex ( Culex ) spp.…”

Meta-transcriptomics and the evolutionary biology of RNA viruses

“…Meta-transcriptomic studies have radically changed this view, including the identification of a large number of 'insect-specific' flaviviruses (Bolling et al, 2015;May et al, 2013;Qin et al, 2014;Shi et al, 2016b). Indeed, flavi-like viruses now appear to be a group of predominantly invertebrate RNA viruses with the potential to have very large genomes (∼26 kb) and which can be arranged in four or five segments (Ladner et al, 2016;Qin et al, 2014). Even more dramatic is that some of these flavi-like viruses appear to comprise distinct virus particles such that they are multipartite, a form of genome organization that was previously thought to be the exclusive domain of plant RNA viruses (Ladner et al, 2016).…”

The Strange Lifestyle of Multipartite Viruses

“…Thus far in animals, the only viral species demonstrated to be multipartite as defined here are the ssDNA bidensoviruses in silkworm [7] and a very recently reported ss(+)RNA virus in mosquitoes [8]. Note that the polydnaviruses of insects are not considered here as multipartite viruses.…”