Screening great ape museum specimens for DNA viruses.
More On Article
- HEAS Seed Grants February 2025 Round
- OeAW Early Career Researchers Visit the UBB
- HEAS Member Magdalena Blanz receives an FWF Erwin Schrödinger Grant to research compound-specific stable isotope ratios
- Absolute dating of Bronze Age urn burials in the central Balkans: Cemeteries of copper-producing societies in eastern Serbia
- HEAS Member Barbara Horejs interviewed on Austrian radio on Archaeogenetics
Hämmerle, M., Guellil, M., Trgovec-Greif, L., Cheronet, O., Sawyer, S., Ruiz-Gartzia, I., Lizano, E., Rymbekova, A., Gelabert, P., Bernardi, P., Han, S., Rattei, T., Schuenemann, V.J., Marques-Bonet, T., Guschanski, K., Calvignac-Spencer, S., Pinhasi, R., Kuhlwilm, M., 2024. Screening great ape museum specimens for DNA viruses. Scientific Reports 14, 29806.
Abstract
Natural history museum collections harbour a record of wild species from the past centuries, providing a unique opportunity to study animals as well as their infectious agents. Thousands of great ape specimens are kept in these collections, and could become an important resource for studying the evolution of DNA viruses. Their genetic material is likely to be preserved in dry museum specimens, as reported previously for monkeypox virus genomes from historical orangutan specimens. Here, we screened 209 great ape museum specimens for 99 different DNA viruses, using hybridization capture coupled with short-read high-throughput sequencing. We determined the presence of multiple viruses within this dataset from historical specimens and obtained several near-complete viral genomes. In particular, we report high-coverage (> 18-fold) hepatitis B virus genomes from one gorilla and two chimpanzee individuals, which are phylogenetically placed within clades infecting the respective host species.