Bats host major mammalian paramyxoviruses

Drexler, Jan Felix; Corman, Victor Max; Müller, Marcel Alexander; Maganga, Gael Darren; Vallo, Peter; Binger, Tabea; Gloza-Rausch, Florian; Rasche, Andrea; Yordanov, Stoian; Seebens, Antje; Oppong, Samuel; Sarkodie, Yaw Adu; Pongombo, Célestin; Lukashev, Alexander N.; Schmidt-Chanasit, Jonas; Stöcker, Andreas; Carneiro, Aroldo José Borges; Erbar, Stephanie; Maisner, Andrea; Fronhoffs, Florian; Buettner, Reinhard; Kalko, Elisabeth K.V.; Kruppa, Thomas; Franke, Carlos Roberto; Kallies, René; Yandoko, Emmanuel R.N.; Herrler, Georg; Reusken, Chantal; Hassanin, Alexandre; Krüger, Detlev H.; Matthee, Sonja; Ulrich, Rainer G.; Leroy, Eric M.; Drosten, Christian

In this study, we have gathered evidence of bats being in close evolutionary and ecological relationship with several genera of mammalian PVs. The investigation of viral host associations can be a lengthy and controversial process that depends on targeted and ecologically informed sampling [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] . We believe that we have assembled the largest and most diversified single-sample set for investigating viruses in mammalian hosts. We focused on bats and rodents because of their unique properties among the mammals in terms of large social group sizes, intense social interaction and high population densities. Further criteria included high spatial mobility in the case of bats, and high population turnover in the case of rodents [1] [2] 4, 30 . However, our data were not limited to these taxa, as an essential part of our analysis involved database-derived PV from a large range of other mammals as well as birds. The evolutionary distance between the analysed host taxa considerably exceeded that of either the bats or the rodents studied. It should be mentioned that PV entries in GenBank with and without our new data were not over-emphasising chiropteran or rodent hosts. As shown in Supplementary Fig. S6 , the majority of PV entries were from primates, birds, carnivores and ungulates. Even after addition of our novel data to GenBank data sets, the number of PV sequences from bats was just even with that from ungulates.