Indonesian fruit bats are often infected with viruses like FBAHV1FLICKR, SHELLAC
Species: Fruit bat alphaherpesvirus 1 (FBAHV1)
Genome size: 149,459 base pairs
A team led by investigators at Japan’s Hokkaido University has reported the genome sequence of a novel virus that infects several species of Indonesian bats. The work, published in the Journal of Virology this month (June 18), is the first complete sequence of a bat-derived alphaherpesvirus, called FBAHV1.
Bat-borne viruses can cause zoonotic infections in humans and other animals. Although alphaherpesviruses are known to occur in humans, little is known about their distribution in bats. FBAHV1, a previously unknown double-stranded DNA virus, was found to infect wild bats with no obvious symptoms, such as liver damage or pneumonia. But FBAHV1 caused lethal lung, liver, and brain infections in laboratory mice. While natural infection of ...
