Discovery of an ebolavirus-like filovirus in europe

Abstract

Filoviruses, amongst the most lethal of primate pathogens, have only been reported as natural infections in sub-Saharan Africa and the Philippines. Infections of bats with the ebolaviruses and marburgviruses do not appear to be associated with disease. Here we report identification in dead insectivorous bats of a genetically distinct filovirus, provisionally named Lloviu virus, after the site of detection, Cueva del Lloviu, in Spain.

Figure 1. Hematoxylin and eosin stained sections through lung (A) and spleen (B) of infected M. schreibersii.

(A) Thickened interalveolar septae (arrowhead) (bar  = 500 µm) and infiltrates comprising lymphocytes and macrophages (higher magnification inset) (bar  = 50 µm). (B) Depletion of the lymphocytes and lymphoid follicles (bar  = 200 µm).

Figure 2. Genomic organization of LLOV.

The black bars indicate the ORFs while the red arrows corresponding to their predicted mRNA transcripts. Start (turquoise) and termination (orange) signals for each transcript are displayed.

Figure 3. Phylogenetic analysis of LLOV.

(A) Analysis of the conserved domain of the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase of Mononegavirales . Branch lengths in the unrooted tree are nonsynonymous distances (dN) taken from the subset of the second codon position of the conserved domain III of the polymerase protein (DS1). Bootstrap results (displayed in colors) were computed using 1,000 pseudoreplicates of the original dataset (DS1); (B) Analysis of the complete genome of Filoviridae . Rooted topology summarizes the historical relationships of 48 complete genome viruses of Filoviridae. Values on branches represent clade probabilities (SH). Values lower than 0.5 are not shown. Branch lengths were constrained to show ultrametric distances. Unconstrained distances and the full set of outgroup species are shown in Figure S5.