Cameroonian fruit bats harbor divergent viruses, including rotavirus H, bastroviruses, and picobirnaviruses using an alternative genetic code

Yinda, Claude Kwe; Ghogomu, Stephen Mbigha; Conceição-Neto, Nádia; Beller, Leen; Deboutte, Ward; Vanhulle, Emiel; Maes, Piet; Van Ranst, Marc; Matthijnssens, Jelle

AAG53583_human_PBV viruses, suggest either that these viruses are true crustacean viruses (instead of bat infecting viruses), or (more likely) that there is a lack of available sequence data of this virus from other potential host species, which does not allow us to make a reasonable assumption about its true host species at this moment. Only for the Cameroonian strain P16-366, a capsid sequence could be identified in our metagenomics data. In an attempt to identify the 'missing' highly divergent capsid sequences we used a custom build database containing all known PBV capsid genes and used HMMER to search the sequencing pools in which we found the PBV RdRps. However, no capsid sequences could be identified. As an internal control, we used the same procedure to successfully identify the previously identified capsid sequence in the pool containing picobirna-like virus P16-366. Furthermore, for the PBV-like RdRp sequences derived from crustaceans and also using the alternative codons, no capsids had been described either (Shi et al. 2016 ). This could also be because of the inability of the used methods (DIAMOND and HMMER motif finder search; Finn et al. 2011; Buchfink et al. 2015) to detect highly divergent capsid sequences.