Metavirome of 31 tick species provides a compendium of 1,801 RNA virus genomes
Xue-Bing Ni, Xiaoming Cui, Jinyue Liu, Run‐Ze Ye, Yuqian Wu, Jia-Fu Jiang, Yi Sun, Qian Wang, Marcus Ho-Hin Shum, Qiao‐Cheng Chang, Lin Zhao, Xiaohu Han, Ke Ma, Shi-Jing Shen, Mingzhu Zhang, Wen-Bin Guo, Jin-Guo Zhu, Lin Zhan, Liangjing Li, Shujun Ding, Dai-Yun Zhu, Jie Zhang, Luo‐Yuan Xia, Xiang-Yong Oong, Xiangdong Ruan, Hongze Shao, Tengcheng Que, Guangyuan Liu, Chunhong Du, En-Jiong Huang, Xin Wang, Li-Feng Du, Chongcai Wang, Wenqiang Shi, Yu-Sheng Pan, Yuhao Zhou, Jiang-Li Qu, Jiang Ma, Cai-Wei Gong, Qi-Qing Chen, Qian Qin, Tommy Tsan‐Yuk Lam, Na Jia, Wu‐Chun Cao
Abstract
The increasing prevalence and expanding distribution of tick-borne viruses globally have raised health concerns, but the full repertoire of the tick virome has not been assessed. We sequenced the meta-transcriptomes of 31 different tick species in the Ixodidae and Argasidae families from across mainland China, and identified 724 RNA viruses with distinctive virome compositions among genera. A total of 1,801 assembled and complete or nearly complete viral genomes revealed an extensive diversity of genome architectures of tick-associated viruses, highlighting ticks as a reservoir of RNA viruses. We examined the phylogenies of different virus families to investigate virome evolution and found that the most diverse tick-associated viruses are positive-strand RNA virus families that demonstrate more ancient divergence than other arboviruses. Tick-specific viruses are often associated with only a few tick species, whereas virus clades that can infect vertebrates are found in a wider range of tick species. We hypothesize that tick viruses can exhibit both 'specialist' and 'generalist' evolutionary trends. We hope that our virome dataset will enable much-needed research on vertebrate-pathogenic tick-associated viruses.