AUTHOR=Liphardt Schuyler W. , Kang Hae Ji , Arai Satoru , Gu Se Hun , Cook Joseph A. , Yanagihara Richard 

TITLE=Reassortment Between Divergent Strains of Camp Ripley Virus (Hantaviridae) in the Northern Short-Tailed Shrew (Blarina brevicauda)

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2020

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-and-infection-microbiology/articles/10.3389/fcimb.2020.00460

DOI=10.3389/fcimb.2020.00460

ISSN=2235-2988

ABSTRACT=Genomic reassortment between segmented RNA virus strains is an important evolutionary mechanism that can generate novel viruses that may have profound effects on human health, such as the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009 arising from reassortment of two swine influenza viruses. Studies of viruses other than influenza indicate that the majority of reassortment events occur between closely related lineages purportedly due to molecular constraints during viral packaging that limit the compatibility of divergent segments. In the original report of Camp Ripley virus (RPLV), a newfound hantavirus in the northern short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda), phylogenetic incongruence between different genomic segments suggested reassortment. We have expanded sampling to include RPLV sequences amplified from archival tissues of 36 northern short-tailed shrews collected in 11 states (Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin), and one southern short-tailed shrew from Florida, within the eastern United States. Using Bayesian phylogenetic analysis and Graph-incompatibility-based Reassortment Finder, we identified multiple instances of reassortment that spanned the Hantaviridae phylogenetic tree, including three highly divergent, co-circulating lineages of the M segment that have reassorted with a conserved L segment in multiple populations of B. brevicauda. In addition to identifying the first known mobatvirus-like M-segment sequences from a North American soricid host and only the second from a eulipotyphlan mammal, our results suggest that reassortment may be more common between deeply divergent virus strains than previously acknowledged and provide strong justification for expanded spatial, temporal, and taxonomic analyses of segmented viruses.