Virus- and Interferon Alpha-Induced Transcriptomes of Cells from the Microbat Myotis daubentonii

Hölzer, Martin; Schoen, Andreas; Wulle, Julia; Müller, Marcel A.; Drosten, Christian; Marz, Manja; Weber, Friedemann

Bats (order Chiroptera) are classified into the suborders Yinpterochiroptera (Syn. Pteropodiformes) and Yangochiroptera (Syn. Vespertilioniformes) (Teeling et al., 2018) . Members of both suborders are infected by a wide range of virus species (Calisher et al., 2006) . However, despite some progress, the contribution of the IFN response to their special ability to host viruses is not yet clarified. For Yinpterochiroptera such as Pteropus alecto, vampyrus or Rousettus aegyptiacus (all family Pteropodidae, or ''megabats' ') , several studies had measured the global transcriptional response of cells to infection with, e.g., Ebola, Marburg, Nipah, or Hendra virus (Hö lzer et al., 2016; Kuzmin et al., 2017; Wynne et al., 2014) or to the IFN-inducing Newcastle Disease virus (NDV) (Glennon et al., 2015) . By contrast, for the more diverse bat suborder Yangochiroptera (generically termed ''microbats'') there are just two virus-induced cell transcriptomes available (Gerrard et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2013) . However, the full virus response capability of bats remains uncharted because almost all cell response studies bar one (Glennon et al., 2015) with megabats and all studies with microbats employed wild-type viruses, which are weak IFN inducers. With respect to the response to IFN itself, there are expression profiles of cells from the megabat P. alecto (De La Cruz-Rivera et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2017) , and Shaw et al. recently conducted a pan-species comparison of IFN-stimulated cell transcriptomes, which included the megabat P. vampyrus and the Yangochiroptera microbat (family Vespertilionidae) Myotis lucifugus (Shaw et al., 2017) .