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

Tracing hosts in PV phylogeny. To extract information on hosts during the more recent evolution of extant mammalian PV, the most parsimonious hypothesis of historical host trait changes was reconstructed along the PV tree. To take topological uncertainty into account, this analysis was done on a large set of phylogenetic trees extracted from the terminal phase of an optimised Bayesian inference of phylogeny. The numbers of deduced transitions between ordinal categories of hosts including bats, rodents, primates, carnivores, ungulates and birds were estimated and averaged over > 10,000 trees. To achieve a proper representation of PV from hosts other than bats and rodents, reference sequences were selected from GenBank so as to provide a maximal genetic diversity per ordinal host category (Fig. 8a ). In summary, these analyses determined host switches from bats into other host categories to have occurred more often than switches originating from any other of these host categories (Fig. 8b ).