The virome ofRhipicephalus,DermacentorandHaemaphysalisticks from Eastern Romania includes novel viruses with potential relevance for public health

Abstract

Ticks are involved in the transmission of various pathogens and several tick‐borne diseases cause significant problems for the health of humans and livestock. The composition of viral communities in ticks and their interactions with pathogens, is poorly understood, particularly in Eastern Europe, an area that represents a major hub for animal‐arthropod vectors exchanges (e.g., via bird migrations). The aim of this study was to describe the virome of Dermacentor sp., Rhipicephalus sp. and Haemaphysalis sp. ticks collected from relatively little studied regions of Romania (Iasi and Tulcea counties) located at the intersection of various biotopes, countries and routes of migrations. We also focused the study on viruses that could potentially have relevance for human and animal health. In 2019, more than 500 ticks were collected from the vegetation and from small ruminants and analysed by high‐throughput transcriptome sequencing. Among the viral communities infecting Romanian ticks, viruses belonging to the Flaviviridae, Phenuiviridae and Nairoviridae families were identified and full genomes were derived. Phylogenetic analyses placed them in clades where mammalian isolates are found, suggesting that these viruses could constitute novel arboviruses. The characterization of these communities increase the knowledge of the diversity of viruses in Eastern Europe and provides a basis for further studies about the interrelationship between ticks and tick‐borne viruses.

Detection of Phenuiviridae, Chuviridae Members, and a Novel Quaranjavirus in Hard Ticks From Danube Delta

“…As described previously ( 9 ), raw reads were processed with an in-house bioinformatics pipeline that comprises quality check and trimming, read normalization and assembly, open reading frames (ORFs) prediction, and taxonomic assignation of contigs and singletons using three successive specialized (RVDB-prot) ( 28 ) and generalist (NCBI/nr and NCBI/nt) databases.…”

“…Despite previous reports that indicate that recently described tick-borne disease-causing agents (Tacheng tick virus 2, Jingmenvirus) and novel viruses that belong to viral families encompassing tick-borne arboviruses (Nayun tick nairovirus, Bole tick virus 4, and Sulina virus) circulate in the region ( 9 , 10 ), the virome of ticks remains understudied in this area.…”

A Novel Flavi-like Virus in Alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) Crops along the Snake River Valley

“…A BLASTn search of the GenBank database returned no similar nucleotide sequences. A BLASTp search of the +RNA virus subset of the NCBI non-redundant protein sequence database (as of 20 April 2022) yielded a significant alignment (expectation value 2 × 10 −4 ; 21% identity over an amino acid sequence alignment containing 265 positions with a 450 amino acid C-terminal region of the polyprotein of Bole tick virus 4 (GenBank Accession number QUJ17980 [33])) containing the four amino acid motifs (including the GDD signature of the catalytic site) diagnostic of the +RNA virus RdRPs (Supplementary Figure S1). Subsequent PSI-BLAST iterations demonstrated significant similarity with the RdRPcontaining regions of the polyproteins of many flavi-like viruses that have been recently identified by metagenomic approaches in arthropod holobionts [28].…”

Jingmenviruses: Ubiquitous, understudied, segmented flavi-like viruses

“…Amblyomma, Dermacentor, Haemaphysalis, Hyalomma, and Ixodes (Maruyama et al, 2014;Qin et al, 2014;Souza et al, 2018;Dinçer et al, 2019Dinçer et al, , 2022Jia et al, 2019;Meng et al, 2019;Pascoal et al, 2019;Sameroff et al, 2019;Temmam et al, 2019;Gondard et al, 2020;Gómez et al, 2020;Ternovoi et al, 2020b;Xu et al, 2020Xu et al, , 2021Bratuleanu et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Shi et al, 2021;Ogola et al, 2022), as well as two mosquito species (Qin et al, 2014;Parry et al, 2021). The local prevalence of JMTV RNA in tick species such as Hae.…”

“…In fact, JMTV was found in high prevalence in R. microplus from China (53–63%), Brazil (25–67%), Trinidad and Tobago (6–46%), and the French Antilles (24–77%) over the years ( Maruyama et al, 2014 ; Qin et al, 2014 ; Souza et al, 2018 ; Pascoal et al, 2019 ; Sameroff et al, 2019 ; Temmam et al, 2019 ; Gondard et al, 2020 ; Guo J. J. et al, 2020 ; Kobayashi et al, 2021 ; Xu et al, 2021 ). However, the nature of the samples containing JMTV RNA extends beyond this species and includes 25 additional tick species from several genera, Rhipicephalus, Amblyomma, Dermacentor, Haemaphysalis, Hyalomma , and Ixodes ( Maruyama et al, 2014 ; Qin et al, 2014 ; Souza et al, 2018 ; Dinçer et al, 2019 , 2022 ; Jia et al, 2019 ; Meng et al, 2019 ; Pascoal et al, 2019 ; Sameroff et al, 2019 ; Temmam et al, 2019 ; Gondard et al, 2020 ; Guo J. J. et al, 2020 ; Gómez et al, 2020 ; Ternovoi et al, 2020b ; Xu et al, 2020 , 2021 ; Bratuleanu et al, 2021 ; Li et al, 2021 ; Shi et al, 2021 ; Ogola et al, 2022 ), as well as two mosquito species ( Qin et al, 2014 ; Parry et al, 2021 ). The local prevalence of JMTV RNA in tick species such as Hae.…”