Non-invasive surveys of mammalian viruses using environmental DNA

Niccolo Alfano; Anisha Dayaram; Jan Axtner; Kyriakos Tsangaras; Marie-Louise Kampmann; Azlan Mohamed; Seth Timothy Wong; M. Thomas P. Gilbert; Andreas Wilting; Alex Daivd Greenwood

Emerging infectious viruses increasingly threaten human, domestic animal and wildlife health [12] . Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases in humans are of zoonotic origin [13] . Wildlife trade and consumption of bushmeat, especially in Africa and Asia, have increasingly played a role in pathogen spillovers into human populations [14, 15] . Wildlife markets have recently facilitated the spillover of SARS-CoV-2 to humans [16] resulting in a pandemic [17] . The 2002-2003 SARS-CoV outbreak [18] , the Ebola outbreak in West Africa [19] and the global emergence of HIV [20] have all been linked to wildlife trade and bushmeat consumption. Early detection of novel infectious agents in wildlife represent a key factor to prevent their emergence. However, identification, surveillance and monitoring of emerging viruses using currently broadly applied approaches based on direct sampling of wildlife requires enormous investment in sampling, particularly for viruses that have low prevalence [21] . For example, 25,000 wild birds were sampled in Germany to detect avian influenza prevalence below 1% [22] . Similarly, sampling of over 8,157 animals in Poland was required to determine an 0.12% prevalence of African swine fever virus (ASF) [23] . Sampling under remote field conditions or in developing countries present additional challenges.