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

To fill these gaps, we devised a study for the Yangochiroptera microbat Myotis daubentonii (family Vespertilionidae). M. daubentonii is a carrier of lyssaviruses prevailing from Europe to Japan (McElhinney et al., 2018) . On the phylogenetical tree, it is maximally separated from the previously studied Pteropodidae megabats (Teeling et al., 2018) . We stimulated M. daubentonii cells either with a strong IFN inducer virus or with type I IFN and measured global transcription at two different time points. Our results reveal several unique features like novel virus-response genes and an elevated number of paralogs of the antiviral ISG BST2. Unlike reported for megabats (Pavlovich et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2016) we could not detect different IFN-alpha subtypes or unusually high base levels of IFNs. Thus, besides exhibiting conserved antiviral responses and ISGs, several traits of the Yangochiroptera microbats are unique and not even observed for megabats.