Data from: Blood transcriptomes reveal novel parasitic zoonoses circulating in Madagascar's lemurs

Zoonotic diseases are a looming threat to global populations, and nearly
75% of emerging infectious diseases can spread among wildlife, domestic
animals and humans. A ‘One World, One Health’ perspective offers us an
ideal framework for understanding and potentially mitigating the spread of
zoonoses, and the island of Madagascar serves as a natural laboratory for
conducting these studies. Rapid habitat degradation and climate change on
the island are contributing to more frequent contact among humans,
livestock and wildlife, increasing the potential for pathogen spillover
events. Given Madagascar's long geographical isolation, coupled with
recent and repeated introduction of agricultural and invasive species, it
is likely that a number of circulating pathogens remain uncharacterized in
lemur populations. Thus, it is imperative that new approaches be
implemented for de novo pathogen discovery. To this end, we used
non-targeted deep sequencing of blood transcriptomes from two species of
critically endangered wild lemurs (Indri indri and Propithecus diadema) to
characterize blood-borne pathogens. Our results show several undescribed
vector-borne parasites circulating within lemurs, some of which may cause
disease in wildlife, livestock and humans. We anticipate that advanced
methods for de novo identification of unknown pathogens will have broad
utility for characterizing other complex disease transmission systems.

人畜共患病（Zoonotic Diseases）是全球人群面临的严峻潜在威胁，近75%的新发传染病可在野生动物、家畜与人类之间传播。“同一个世界、同一个健康”（One World, One Health）理念为我们理解并潜在防控人畜共患病的传播提供了理想研究框架，而马达加斯加岛正是开展此类研究的天然实验室。该岛正经历生境快速退化与气候变化，这使得人类、家畜与野生动物的接触频率不断升高，提升了病原体溢出事件的发生风险。由于马达加斯加长期处于地理隔离状态，加之近期反复引入农业物种与入侵物种，狐猴种群中仍有大量循环传播的病原体尚未被鉴定。因此，亟需采用全新手段开展从头（de novo）病原体发现工作。为此，我们对两种极度濒危的野生狐猴——大狐猴（Indri indri）和冕狐猴（Propithecus diadema）——的血液转录组进行非靶向深度测序，以表征血液传播病原体。研究结果显示，狐猴体内循环着多种未被报道过的虫媒寄生虫，其中部分可能对野生动物、家畜及人类造成致病风险。我们预计，这类用于未知病原体从头鉴定的先进方法，将在其他复杂疾病传播系统的研究中具备广泛应用前景。