Isolation and Characterization of a Novel Gammaherpesvirus from a Microbat Cell Line

Shabman, Reed S.; Shrivastava, Susmita; Tsibane, Tshidi; Attie, Oliver; Jayaprakash, Anitha; Mire, Chad E.; Dilley, Kari E.; Puri, Vinita; Stockwell, Timothy B.; Geisbert, Thomas W.; Sachidanandam, Ravi; Basler, Christopher F.

Given the association of bat viruses with human disease, the capacity of BGHV8 to infect human cells is of interest. Our in vitro data indicate that BGHV8 can be propagated in Vero cells and can also productively infect additional cell lines, including some human cell lines, and confirmed viral replication between 1 and 5 days postinfection in several cell lines. Due to its ability to infect human cell lines, we strongly recommend biosafety level 2 precautions when handling BGHV8. BGHV8 clearly clusters with gammaherpesviruses ( Fig. 5 and 6) . BGHV8 also has a classic ORF49/ORF50 cassette and a putative LANA gene (Fig. 4) , suggesting that it has the ability to establish latency, a focus of future work.