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

RVs are major enteric pathogen causing severe dehydrating diarrhea mostly in the young of humans and animals worldwide (Bridger et al. 1998) . RVs belong to the family Reoviridae and the genus RV consists of nine species, A to I (Attoui et al. 2012; Mihalov-Ková cs et al. 2015) . RVAs are the most common of all the species having a wide host range including humans. Unlike RVA, RVH, initially referred to as Novel adult diarrhoea RV was mainly identified in humans (China and Bangladesh) and pigs from Brazil, USA, and South Africa (Alam et al. 2007; Jiang et al. 2008; Nagashima et al. 2008; Marthaler et al. 2014; Molinari et al. 2015) . We identified RVH reads in two different bat pools, including one near complete genome. Based on genetic relatedness, all the eleven bat RVH segments recovered were distantly related to those of human (19-74% aa identity) and porcine (29-80% aa identity) RVH strains. The eleven bat RVH gene segments were more or less equally distantly related to both human and porcine RVH strains. Similarly, based on the phylogenetic analysis, bat, porcine, and human RVH strains formed three distinct sub-clusters distantly related to each other (Fig. 3) . A recent paper described partial sequences of VP1, VP3 and VP4 RVH sequences (268, 340, and 202 nt, respectively) from South Korean bat fecal samples (Kim et al. 2016 ). These Korean bat RVH strains were only distantly related to human, porcine and the Cameroonian bat RVH strains (nt identity of 68-71%) described here, suggesting a broad genetic diversity of bat RVH strains ( Supplementary Fig. S1 ). RVH was first identified as a cause of outbreaks of gastroenteritis in humans in China in 1997 and in a sporadic case of adult diarrhea in Bangladesh (Alam et al. 2007; Jiang et al. 2008 ). It has also been increasingly identified in pigs but this might simply be as a results of improved surveillance rather than recent spread. The current identification of RVH in bats further expands its host range and opens new perspetives on the evolutionary origin and history of this pathogen. It has been clearly associated with gastroenetritis in humans and less clearly in pigs as most known infections occur in co-infections (Rosen et al. 2000) . PBVs have been identified in feces of several mammals, birds, and invertebrates, and in the respiratory tract of pigs and humans (Pereira et al. 1988; Smits et al. 2011 Smits et al. , 2012 Mondal and Majee 2014; ) . PBVs are currently classified into two genogroups (Smits et al. 2011; Malik et al. 2014 ) and recently, a large number of novel PBV-like sequences from insects have family that could not be assigned to any known genus are referred to as others. Families represented by less than 100 reads were excluded.