Quantitative Delineation of Herpesviruses in Bats for use in Ecological Studies

Anna R. Sjodin; Michael R. Willig; Simon J. Anthony

Three major challenges exist when integrating community ecology and virology. First, most viruses are rare (i.e. exist at low prevalence; Tang et al. 2006 , Winker et al. 2008 , Wacharapluesadee et al. 2010 , Anthony et al. 2015 , so the probability of infection in a host individual is low. Consequently, large datasets of comprehensively sampled host populations are needed to address high levels of uncertainty associated with low viral prevalence. Few such datasets exist. Second, most wildlife viruses are unknown to science (Anthony et al. 2013 , Anthony et al. 2017 , Carlson et al. 2019 , and the process of defining viral species is timeconsuming (King et al 2012) . This means that waiting for official designations of viral species for use in community-level analyses does not address the urgency of current health challenges posed by wildlife viruses. Alternatives to official designation of viral species include delineating operational taxonomic units (OTUs) using monophyletic groups (Anthony et al 2015) or percent identity histograms (Maes et al. 2009 , Anthony et al. 2017 ). However, both such methods rely on subjectively chosen cutoff points to differentiate OTUs. Finally, many viral infections last only hours to days, making detection difficult (Klenk et al. 2004, Lee et al. 2009, Henaux and Samuel Herpesviruses are large, enveloped, double-stranded DNA viruses that infect all vertebrate classes and mollusks (King et al. 2012 , Azab et al. 2018 . In contrast to many viruses, herpesviruses generally occur at high prevalence (Cone et al. 1993 , Kidd et al. 1996 , Cortez et al. 2008 , Imbronito et al. 2008 , Tenorio de Franca et al. 2012 , Phalen et al. 2017 , Tazikeh et al. 2019 , and they establish latent, long-term (often for the entirety of the host's life)