Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jul;69(4):2384-2389.
doi: 10.1111/tbed.14150. Epub 2021 May 28.

Detection of coronavirus in vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) in southern Brazil

Raquel Silva Alves  1 , Juliana do Canto Olegário  1 , Matheus Nunes Weber  2 , Mariana Soares da Silva  1 , Raissa Canova  1 , Jéssica Tatiane Sauthier  1 , Letícia Ferreira Baumbach  1 , André Alberto Witt  1   3 , Ana Paula Muterle Varela  4 , Fabiana Quoos Mayer  4 , Renata da Fontoura Budaszewski  1 , Cláudio Wageck Canal  1
Affiliations

Detection of coronavirus in vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) in southern Brazil

Raquel Silva Alves et al. Transbound Emerg Dis. 2022 Jul.

Abstract

The vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is a haematophagous animal that feeds exclusively on the blood of domestic mammals. Vampire bat feeding habits enable their contact with mammalian hosts and may enhance zoonotic spillover. Moreover, they may carry several pathogenic organisms, including coronaviruses (CoVs), for which they are important hosts. The human pathogens that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS-CoV) and possibly coronavirus disease 2019 (SARS-CoV-2) all originated in bats but required bridge hosts to spread into human populations. To monitor the presence of potential zoonotic viruses in bats, the present work evaluated the presence of CoVs in vampire bats from southern Brazil. A total of 101 vampire bats were captured and euthanized between 2017 and 2019 in Rio Grande do Sul state, southern Brazil. The brain, heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and intestines were collected and macerated individually. The samples were pooled and submitted to high-throughput sequencing (HTS) using the Illumina MiSeq platform and subsequently individually screened using a pancoronavirus RT-PCR protocol. We detected CoV-related sequences in HTS, but only two (2/101; 1.98%) animals had CoV detected in the intestines by RT-PCR. Partial sequences of RdRp and spike genes were obtained in the same sample and the RdRp region in the other sample. The sequences were classified as belonging to Alphacoronavirus. The sequences were closely related to alphacoronaviruses detected in vampire bats from Peru. The continuous monitoring of bat CoVs may help to map and predict putative future zoonotic agents with great impacts on human health.

Keywords: Bat; Coronavirus; Desmodus rotundus; PCR; sequencing.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Geographical distribution of sampled vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) investigated for the presence of coronaviruses (CoVs) in Rio Grande do Sul state, southern Brazil. The pie chart refers to the proportion of animals collected in the study, where the colour green represents the total proportion of collected bats and white the proportion of bats collected on this site. A black star represents location displaying positive bats for CoV detected in the present study
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Amino acid phylogenetic trees constructed using sequences of RNA‐dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) (a) and spike genes (b). The phylogenetic trees were constructed using MEGA 6 software using the maximum likelihood algorithm method based on the JTT model in 1,000 replicates. The sequences obtained in the present study were deposited in the GenBank database under accession numbers MW465544, MW465545 and MW473477
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Asano, K. M. , Hora, A. S. , Scheffer, K. C. , Fahl, W. O. , Iamamoto, K. , Mori, E. , & Brandão, P. E. (2016). Alphacoronavirus in urban Molossidae and Phyllostomidae bats, Brazil. Virology Journal, 13, 110. 10.1186/s12985-016-0569-4 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Banerjee, A. , Kulcsar, K. , Misra, V. , Frieman, M. , & Mossman, K. (2019). Bats and Coronaviruses. Viruses, 11, 7–9. 10.3390/v11010041 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Bergner, L. M. , Orton, R. J. , & Streicker, D. G. (2020). Complete genome sequence of an Alphacoronavirus from common vampire bats in Peru. Microbiology Resource Announcements, 9, 1–3. 10.1128/mra.00742-20 - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Boni, M. F. , Lemey, P. , Jiang, X. , Lam, T. T. Y. , Perry, B. W. , Castoe, T. A. , Rambaut, A. , & Robertson, D. L. (2020). Evolutionary origins of the SARS‐CoV‐2 sarbecovirus lineage responsible for the COVID‐19 pandemic. Nature Microbiology, 5, 1408–1417. 10.1038/s41564-020-0771-4 - DOI - PubMed
    1. Brandão, P. E. , Scheffer, K. , Villarreal, L. Y. , Achkar, S. , Oliveira, R. D. N. , Fahl, W. D. O. , Castilho, J. G. , Kotait, I. , & Richtzenhain, L. J. (2008). A coronavirus detected in the vampire bat Desmodus rotundus. Brazilian Journal of Infectious Diseases, 12, 466–468. 10.1590/S1413-86702008000600003 - DOI - PubMed

Substances