Viral metagenomics survey of bats from Saudi Arabia

Bats are implicated as reservoirs for a wide range of zoonotic viruses including SARS and MERS coronaviruses, ebola, marburg, lyssa, nipah and hendra viruses. Accordingly, many One Health surveillance and discovery programs focus on bat viromics. Here we report virome analyses of bats from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Unbiased high throughput sequencing of 72 bat fecal samples from four bat species Rhinopoma hardwickii (R. hardwickii), Taphozous perforatus (T. perforates), Eidolon helvum (E. helvum) and Rousettus aegyptiacus (R. aegyptiacus) revealed molecular evidence of a diverse set of viral families, including whole genomes of hepatovirus, rotavirus, polyomavirus, papillomavirus and partial genomes of astrovirus, sapovirus, teschovirus, parechovirus, coronavirus, adenovirus, paramyxovirus and chuvirus. Additionally, we also discovered KSA-Hepe-Astrovirus, which appears to be similar to a recently discovered basto like virus, with a genomic organization similar to Hepeviridae and homology to Hepeviridae in ORF1 and homology to Astroviridae in ORF2. The Hepe-Astrovirus also represents a phylogenetic bridge between Hepeviridae and Astroviridae.