Bats Possess Unique Variants of the Antiviral Restriction Factor Tetherin

Joshua A. Hayward; Mary Tachedjian; Adam Johnson; Tamsin B. Gordon; Jie Cui; Glenn A. Marsh; Michelle L. Baker; Lin-Fa Wang; Gilda Tachedjian

To advance our understanding of bat tetherin homologs, we mined all available publically accessible sequence read archives representing 26 species of bats through a BLASTn analysis ( Table 1 ). The species analysed here represent 8 of the 20 families within the order Chiroptera: three families (Hipposideridae, Pteropodidae, and Rhinolophidae) from within the suborder Yinpterochiroptera, and five families (Emballonuridae, Miniopteridae, Molossidae, Vespertilionidae, and Phyllostomidae) from within the suborder Yangochiroptera. This analysis revealed mRNA sequences representing homologs of human tetherin from 26 bat species, enabling the generation of a consensus bat tetherin sequence from a multiple sequence alignment ( Figure 1A and SI Data 1). The primary sequence lengths range from 177 to 221 AA, compared to 180 AA for human l-tetherin, and of these only 23 residues were conserved in 100% of the bat tetherin sequences analysed ( Figure 1B ). The assembled tetherin sequence for all bats was a homolog of human l-tetherin, except for the Black-bearded Tomb bat (Taphozous melanopogon), which was predicted to possess an equivalent of the human s-tetherin.