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）是全球人口面临的严峻威胁，近75%的新发传染病可在野生动物、家畜与人类之间跨宿主传播。“同一健康（One World, One Health）”理念为我们理解并潜在遏制人畜共患病的传播提供了理想框架，而马达加斯加岛正是开展此类研究的天然实验室。该岛快速的栖息地退化与气候变化，正导致人类、家畜与野生动物之间的接触愈发频繁，提升了病原体溢出事件发生的可能性。鉴于马达加斯加长期的地理隔离，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定性。因此，亟需采用全新方法开展病原体的从头（de novo）发现工作。为此，我们对两种极危野生狐猴——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，以鉴定血液传播病原体。研究结果显示，狐猴种群中存在多种未被描述的虫媒传播寄生虫，其中部分可能会在野生动物、家畜与人类中引发疾病。我们预计，用于未知病原体从头鉴定的先进方法，将在解析其他复杂疾病传播系统中具备广泛应用价值。