Comparative phylogeography of African fruit bats (Chiroptera, Pteropodidae) provide new insights into the outbreak of Ebola virus disease in West Africa, 2014–2016

Abstract

Both Ebolavirus and Marburgvirus were detected in several fruit bat species of the family Pteropodidae, suggesting that this taxon plays a key role in the life cycle of filoviruses. After four decades of Zaire Ebolavirus (ZEBOV) outbreaks in Central Africa, the virus was detected for the first time in West Africa in 2014. To better understand the role of fruit bats as potential reservoirs and circulating hosts between Central and West Africa, we examine here the phylogeny and comparative phylogeography of Pteropodidae. Our phylogenetic results confirm the existence of four independent lineages of African fruit bats: the genera Eidolon and Rousettus, and the tribes Epomophorini and Scotonycterini, and indicate that the three species suspected to represent ZEBOV reservoir hosts (Epomops franqueti, Hypsignathus monstrosus, and Myonycteris torquata) belong to an African clade that diversified rapidly around 8-7 Mya. To test for phylogeographic structure and for recent gene flow from Central to West Africa, we analysed the nucleotide variation of 675 cytochrome b gene (Cytb) sequences, representing eight fruit bat species collected in 48 geographic localities. Within Epomophorina, our mitochondrial data do not support the monophyly of two genera (Epomops and Epomophorus) and four species (Epomophorus gambianus, Epomops franqueti, Epomops buettikoferi, and Micropteropus pusillus). In Epomops, however, we found two geographic haplogroups corresponding to the Congo Basin and Upper Guinea forests, respectively. By contrast, we found no genetic differentiation between Central and West African populations for all species known to make seasonal movements, Eidolon helvum, E. gambianus, H. monstrosus, M. pusillus, Nanonycteris veldkampii, and Rousettus aegyptiacus. Our results suggest that only three fruit bat species were able to disperse directly ZEBOV from the Congo Basin to Upper Guinea: E. helvum, H. monstrosus, and R. aegyptiacus.

Pan African phylogeography and palaeodistribution of rousettine fruit bats: Ecogeographic correlation with Pleistocene climate vegetation cycles

“…Data from localities within 5 km of one another are displayed on a single chart. Those circles enclosed by bold line include data from both cyt b and CR sequences, and those circles enclosed by thin line only by cyt b (Hassanin et al, ) or CR sequences (present study and Hulva et al, )…”

“…Distributional mapping was based on data from the present study and a meta‐analysis of published distributional records (Benda et al, , ; Bergmans, ; Goodman & Ramasindrazana, ; Hassanin et al, ; Hulva et al, ; Monadjem, Taylor, Cotterill, & Schoeman, ). Current land cover data derived from the ESA Climate Change Initiative ‐ Land Cover (2017) were generalized into seven classes to visualize environmental conditions within the area studied (Figure ).…”

“…This reconstruction, together with the sister‐taxon relationship of Asian Eonycteris to the Rousettus radiation, supports the hypothesis of an Asian origin of the genus. The colonization of Africa is likely to have occurred in the late Pliocene/early Pleistocene, between 2.6 and 1.7 Mya (Almeida et al, ; Hassanin et al, ). Fossils dating from the Early and Middle Miocene of southern France (Aguilar et al, ), morphologically similar to extant Rousettus , support the hypothesis that its Neogene range included the Mediterranean Basin and the Middle East.…”

Multilocus phylogeny and species delimitation within the genusGlauconycteris(Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae), with the description of a new bat species from the Tshopo Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

“…The basal diversification of Glauconycteris occurred when a brief event of aridity, between 6.5 and 6 Mya, was followed by more humid conditions (Bonnefille, ). It also coincides with the first phase of diversification in the two fruit bat tribes that are endemic to Africa, that is, Epomophorini and Scotonycterini (Hassanin et al., , ; Nesi et al., ). As in Glauconycteris , fruit bats diversified into taxa characterized by different body sizes and different habitat types, suggesting that climatic changes led to the exploitation of new ecological niches.…”

Improving immunological insights into the ferret model of human viral infectious disease

“…However, for many viruses, alternative animal models better recapitulate human physiology and disease. Ferrets ( Mustela putorius furo ) have been employed to study the pathogenesis of a variety of human pathogens, including human and avian influenzas, coronaviruses including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS‐CoV), human respiratory syncytial virus (HRSV), human metapneumovirus (HMPV), Ebola virus and henipavirus (Nipah virus and Hendra virus) . While ferrets can be productively infected with many of these viruses, a lack of some tools to interrogate ferret immunological responses to infection limits insights that might impact the development of vaccines and/or therapeutics.…”