Biological characters of bats in relation to natural reservoir of emerging viruses

Abstract

Many investigators focused on bats (Chiroptera) for their specific character, i.e. echolocation system, phylogenic tree, food practice and unique reproduction. However, most of basic information about the vital functions related to anti-viral activity has been unclear. For evaluating some animals as a natural reservoir or host of infectious pathogens, it is necessary that not only their immune system but also their biology, the environment of their living, food habits and physiological features should be clarified and they should be analyzed from these multi-view points. The majority of current studies on infectious diseases have been conducted for the elucidation of viral virulence using experimental animals or viral gene function in vitro, but in a few case, researchers focused on wild animal itself. In this paper, we described basic information about bats as follows; genetic background, character of the immunological factors, histological character of immune organs, the physiological function and sensitivity of bat cells to viral infection.

Molecular Cloning and Expression Analysis of Bat Toll-Like Receptors 3, 7 and 9

“…These diseases include rabies, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, Nipah virus infection and probably SARScorona virus infection [4,10,16,17]. In addition, some virus inoculation experiments in bats suggest that many of the bat-associated pathogens cause no clinicopathology in the bats themselves or cause less damage than is seen in other animals [6,8,13,15].…”

Molecular Cloning and Sequencing of the cDNAs Encoding the Bat Interleukin (IL)-2, IL-4, IL-6, IL-10, IL-12p40, and Tumor Necrosis Factor-Alpha

“…, Shumpei WATANABE 3) , Naoya UEDA 1) , Satoshi TANIGUCHI 1) , Hikaru FUJII 3) , Yoshiyuki ISHII 1) , Shigeru KYUWA 1) , Hiroomi AKASHI 3) and Yasuhiro YOSHIKAWA Recently, there has been an increase in the incidence of infectious diseases originating from bats, such as rabies, Ebola virus, Nipah virus, and most likely severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus [1,14,21]. In addition, several studies involving viral inoculations in bats suggest that some bat-associated pathogens cause less clinicopathological damage in this species, or have no effect, compared to other species [4, 10,16,19].…”

“…Total RNA was isolated from bat spleen with TRIzol Reagent (Invitrogen, Carlsbad, CA, U.S.A.), according to the manufacturer's protocol. Primary cDNAs were synthesized by reverse transcription with Superscript ® III reverse transcriptase (Invitrogen) using an Oligo (dT) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] primer (Invitrogen), followed by PCR with Thermo-Start ® Taq DNA Polymerase (ABgene, Epson, UK). To obtain cDNA clones of the middle region of the mRNAs of bat cytokines, reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) was performed using primer sets that are designed from the ortholog sequence data of horse, pig, and cat available on the GenBank database.…”

Bats as Potential Reservoir Hosts for Vector-Borne Diseases

“…Bats (order Chiroptera) are one of the most diverse, abundant and widely distributed groups of mammals and the only one with the capacity of powered flight (Li et al 2010;Omatsu et al 2007). Nearly 1,000 species are found worldwide, except in the northern and southern polar areas, representing approximately 20 % of all mammalian species (Omatsu et al 2007;Teeling et al 2005).…”

“…Nearly 1,000 species are found worldwide, except in the northern and southern polar areas, representing approximately 20 % of all mammalian species (Omatsu et al 2007;Teeling et al 2005). Chiroptera can be divided into the two suborders Megachiroptera (old world fruit bats) and Microchiroptera (echolocating bats) (Jones et al 2002).…”