Shared ancestry between a newfound mole-borne hantavirus and hantaviruses harbored by cricetid rodents.

Kang HJ, Bennett SN, Hope AG, Cook JA, Yanagihara R.

Citation

Kang HJ, Bennett SN, Hope AG, Cook JA, Yanagihara R. (2011) Shared ancestry between a newfound mole-borne hantavirus and hantaviruses harbored by cricetid rodents. Journal of Virology 85(15):7496-7503.

Abstract

Discovery of genetically distinct hantaviruses in multiple species of shrews (Order Soricomorpha, Family Soricidae) and moles (Family Talpidae) contests the conventional view that rodents (Order Rodentia, Family Muridae and Cricetidae) are the principal reservoir hosts and suggests that the evolutionary history of hantaviruses is far more complex than previously hypothesized. We now report on Rockport virus (RKPV), a hantavirus identified in archival tissues of the eastern mole (Scalopus aquaticus), collected in Rockport, Texas, in 1986. Pair-wise comparison of the full-length S-, M- and L-genomic segments indicated moderately low sequence similarity between RKPV and other soricomorph-borne hantaviruses. Phylogenetic analyses, using maximum-likelihood and Bayesian methods, showed that RKPV shared a most recent common ancestor with cricetid rodent-borne hantaviruses. Distributed widely across the eastern United States, the fossorial eastern mole is sympatric and syntopic with cricetid rodents known to harbor hantaviruses, raising the possibility of host-switching events in the distant past. Our findings warrant more-detailed investigations on the dynamics of spillover and cross-species transmission of present-day hantaviruses within communities of rodents and moles.