Conclusive Evidence of Replication of a Plant Virus in Honeybees Is Lacking

Honey bee colony losses and associated viruses

“…However, TRSV was shown to replicate in nearly every bee tissue and elevated virus levels were found in weak colonies [26 ] (Table 1). This novel and surprising finding of TRSV replicating in honey bees caused some debate [48,49] although this is not the first example of a plant virus replicating in both plants and insects. So far, such viruses have been described from the RNA virus families Bunyaviridae, Nodaviridae, and Rhabdoviridae which are vectored by insects via persistent propagative transmission mode [50,51,52 ,53].…”

Challenges associated with research on RNA viruses of insects

“…For instance, the use of tagged primers to detect viral negative strand RNA must be validated with an in vitro-generated positive strand control or viral RNA to discard the possibility of primer mismatching [54,55 ]. Additional experimentation to overcome these technical issues could include viral genome quantification (regardless of the sense) over time to check for increasing viral loads after inoculation by northern blot or by quantitative RT-PCR.…”

“…For (+) ssRNA viruses, strand-specific RNA sequencing with good validation [51] may help to detect the negative strand (replicative intermediate); but regular RNA-seq and other NGS techniques cannot. Then researchers should be aware of the limitations of massive sequencing tools and other Àomics approaches to avoid misinterpretation [52][53][54].…”

Available Genetic Data Do Not Support Adaptation of Tobacco Ringspot Virus to an Arthropod Host

“…Li and colleagues (2) presented direct evidence of the replicating strand of TRSV in honey bee tissues and showed that TRSV sequence detection rates correlated with season and hive strength in the same manner observed for other viruses known to infect bees. While additional confirmation is desirable (3,4), these observations remain compelling indications that TRSV infects and replicates in honey bees. In contrast to assertions elsewhere (5), detection of TRSV in metagenomic sequence data of honey bees (6) was never represented as evidence of infection.…”