Virus discovery in all three major lineages of terrestrial arthropods highlights the diversity of single-stranded DNA viruses associated with invertebrates
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Entomology, Genomics, Microbiology, Virology
- Keywords
- invertebrate, arthropod, CRESS DNA, ssDNA, replication-associated protein (Rep), spider, insect, discovery, virus
- Copyright
- © 2018 Rosario et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Virus discovery in all three major lineages of terrestrial arthropods highlights the diversity of single-stranded DNA viruses associated with invertebrates. PeerJ Preprints 6:e27093v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27093v1
Abstract
Viruses encoding a replication-associated protein (Rep) within a covalently closed, single-stranded (ss)DNA genome are among the smallest viruses known to infect eukaryotic organisms, including economically valuable agricultural crops and livestock. Although circular Rep-encoding ssDNA (CRESS DNA) viruses are a widespread group for which our knowledge is rapidly expanding, biased sampling towards vertebrates and land plants has limited our understanding of their diversity and evolution. Here we screened terrestrial arthropods for CRESS DNA viruses and report the identification of 44 viral genomes and replicons associated with specimens representing all three major terrestrial arthropod lineages, namely Euchelicerata (spiders), Hexapoda (insects), and Myriapoda (millipedes). We identified virus genomes belonging to three established CRESS DNA viral families (Circoviridae, Genomoviridae, and Smacoviridae); however, over half of the arthropod-associated virus genomes are only distantly related to currently classified CRESS DNA viral sequences. Although members of viral and satellite families known to infect plants (Geminiviridae, Nanoviridae, Alphasatellitidae) were not identified in this study, these plant-infecting CRESS DNA viruses and replicons are transmitted by hemipterans. Therefore, members from six out of the seven established CRESS DNA viral families circulate among arthropods. Furthermore, a phylogenetic analysis of Reps, including endogenous viral sequences, reported to date from a wide array of organisms revealed that most of the known CRESS DNA viral diversity circulates among invertebrates. Our results highlight the vast and unexplored diversity of CRESS DNA viruses among invertebrates and parallel findings from RNA viral discovery efforts in undersampled taxa.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.
Supplemental Information
Alignment used to create approximately maximum likelihood tree shown in Figure 1 in fasta format
Alignment used to create approximately maximum likelihood tree shown in Figure 1 in fasta format. Details regarding sequence acronyms, descriptions, and accession numbers can be found in Supplemental Data S2.
Excel workbook containing three worksheets (W#) with details on intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) profiles, sequences used for Figure 1, accession numbers of non-CRESS DNA molecules
Excel workbook containing three worksheets (W#) with the following information: details regarding intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) profiles (W1), detailed information for sequences found in the alignment used to create approximately maximum likelihood tree shown in Figure 1 (Data S1) (W2), and a table listing accession numbers and information regarding non-CRESS DNA molecules detected in terrestrial arthropods (W3).