Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2021
Virus Prospecting in Crickets-Discovery and Strain Divergence of a Novel Iflavirus in Wild and Cultivated Acheta domesticus
de Miranda, Joachim R.; Granberg, Fredrik; Onorati, Piero; Jansson, Anna; Berggren, AsaAbstract
Orthopteran insects have high reproductive rates leading to boom-bust population dynamics with high local densities that are ideal for short, episodic disease epidemics. Viruses are particularly well suited for such host population dynamics, due to their supreme ability to adapt to changing transmission criteria. However, very little is known about the viruses of Orthopteran insects. Since Orthopterans are increasingly reared commercially, for animal feed and human consumption, there is a risk that viruses naturally associated with these insects can adapt to commercial rearing conditions, and cause disease. We therefore explored the virome of the house cricket Acheta domesticus, which is both part of the natural Swedish landscape and reared commercially for the pet feed market. Only 1% of the faecal RNA and DNA from wild-caught A. domesticus consisted of viruses. These included both known and novel viruses associated with crickets/insects, their bacterial-fungal microbiome, or their plant food. Relatively abundant among these viral Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) was a novel Iflavirus, tentatively named Acheta domesticus Iflavirus (AdIV). Quantitative analyses showed that AdIV was also abundant in frass and insect samples from commercially reared crickets. Interestingly, the wild and commercial AdIV strains had short, extremely divergent variation hotspots throughout the genome, which may indicate specific adaptation to their hosts' distinct rearing environments.Keywords
metagenome; virome; Acheta domesticus; cricket; Acheta domesticus Iflavirus; strain evolution; cricket rearingPublished in
Viruses2021, volume: 13, number: 3, article number: 364
Publisher: MDPI
Authors' information
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Ecology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Biomedical Science and Veterinary Public Health
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Ecology
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Anatomy, Physiology and Biochemistry (AFB)
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Ecology
UKÄ Subject classification
Microbiology
Ecology
Publication Identifiers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/v13030364
URI (permanent link to this page)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/111594