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

In the recent past, there has been an increased interest in bat viruses from all over the world because of the implications of bats as a reservoir for deadly viruses like rabies virus, Marburg virus, SARS-and MERS-related CoVs, and Nipah and Hendra virus. Many virome studies have identified numerous viruses in different viral families around the world (Donaldson et al. 2010; Li et al. 2010; Ge et al. 2012; He et al. 2013; Ng et al. 2013; Chen et al. 2014; O'Shea et al. 2014; Wu et al. 2016) . Most of these studies have been conducted in China and the USA and most of the viruses identified from Africa have been limited to individual virus screening or isolation (Razafindratsimandresy et al. 2009; Drexler et al. 2012 Drexler et al. , 2013 Weiss et al. 2012; Baker et al. 2013; Quan et al. 2013; Corman et al. 2015; Tao et al. 2017; Waruhiu et al. 2017) . Of all these, only two studies report screening of bat viruses in Cameroon with the identification of hepaciviruses, pegiviruses and alphaherpesviruses (Razafindratsimandresy et al. 2009; Quan et al. 2013) . Different from these previous reports, this study characterize the entire fecal virome of one of the most eaten bat species (E. helvum) in Cameroon (Mickleburgh et al. 2009 ) using high-throughput sequencing.