Abstract
RNA viruses have a profound impact on human health and society. In particular, viruses that were previously unknown and that newly emerge in humans from an animal source can have catastrophic impact on the global human population. Virologists are well aware that most of the virus diversity that infects non-human animals is unknown to us, but the extent of the discrepancy between our assumed knowledge on RNA virus diversity and what remains to be discovered has recently become starkly clear through the characterization of relatives of well-known mammalian and human viruses – such as Influenza, Filoviruses, Coronaviruses – in very different vertebrate groups such as reptiles and fish. In this doctoral project, I propose for a PhD student to search for RNA viruses in sequence datasets both publicly available and that we generate ourselves using our extensive vertebrate sample collections. To accomplish this search efficiently, we will leverage on recent advances in sequencing technologies to optimize protocols for unbiased detection of diverse members of important virus families such as Arenaviridae, Coronaviridae, Hantaviridae, Paramyxoviridae, and Retroviridae, in archived animal specimens. We aim to demonstrate that (potentially divergent) relatives of known members of these common virus families also infect vertebrate phylogroups that are usually neglected in virus surveillance efforts. Using the novel vertebrate virus diversity data, we aim to update our understanding of the evolutionary histories of important virus families and test the "prisoner-of-war" hypothesis, that virus evolution over long evolutionary time-scales is directed by host adaptation, ultimately leading to the restriction of rates of viral evolution by the rate of evolution of their hosts. I expect this doctoral project to lead to four high impact manuscripts and will substantially improve our understanding of the drivers of evolutionary divergence and adaptation of RNA viruses.
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