Cameroonian fruit bats harbor divergent viruses, including rotavirus H, bastroviruses, and picobirnaviruses using an alternative genetic code

Yinda, Claude Kwe; Ghogomu, Stephen Mbigha; Conceição-Neto, Nádia; Beller, Leen; Deboutte, Ward; Vanhulle, Emiel; Maes, Piet; Van Ranst, Marc; Matthijnssens, Jelle

We also identified five sequences of the subfamily Densovirinae named as Cameroonian bat densovirus 1-5 (CMRBtDV1-5). We had near complete genomes of CMRBtDV1-CMRBtDV4 (genome lengths of 3,823, 4,327, 4,327, and 5,017 nt respectively) but only 1,761 nt of CMRBtDV5. CMRBtDV1-CMRBtDV3 had a genome organization of two ORFs, ambisense to each other ( Supplementary Fig. S5A ) while that of CMRBtDV4 surprisingly showed four ORFs (two non-structural and two structural) instead of the typical two ORFs for ambidensoviruses ( Supplementary Fig. S5B ). This type of genome origination was also noticed in the closely related Dysaphis plantaginea densovirus isolate, DplDNV (FJ040397; Ryabov et al. 2009 ) and therefore this is unlikely to be a sequencing artifact. Among all the novel densoviruses, the closest to a known densoviruses was CMRBtDV4, which was nested within the genus Ambidensovirus with an aa identity of 52% with DpLDNV (Ryabov et al. 2009 ). The other four identified densoviruses formed two distinct distantly related clades with less than 20% aa identity to all other DVs (Supplementary Fig. S6 ). CMRBtDV2 and CMRBtDV3 are almost 99% identical and closest to CMRBtDV1 (44% aa identity), but with just 17% and 18% aa identity to CMRBtDV4 and CMRBtDV5, respectively. These two clades (CMRBtDV1, CMRBtDV2 and CMRBtDV3, and CMRBtDV5) constitute putative novel genera in the subfamily Densovirinae since both share <30% identity with all other DVs.