Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses

Ebola and other filoviruses pose significant public health and conservation threats by causing high mortality in primates, including humans. Preventing future outbreaks of ebolavirus depends on identifying wildlife reservoirs, but extraordinarily high biodiversity of potential hosts in temporally dy...

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Main Authors:	Han, Barbara A., Schmidt, John Paul, Alexander, Laura W., Bowden, Sarah E., Hayman, David T. S., Drake, John M.
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2016
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4945033/

id	pubmed-4945033
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-49450332016-08-08 Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses Han, Barbara A. Schmidt, John Paul Alexander, Laura W. Bowden, Sarah E. Hayman, David T. S. Drake, John M. Research Article Ebola and other filoviruses pose significant public health and conservation threats by causing high mortality in primates, including humans. Preventing future outbreaks of ebolavirus depends on identifying wildlife reservoirs, but extraordinarily high biodiversity of potential hosts in temporally dynamic environments of equatorial Africa contributes to sporadic, unpredictable outbreaks that have hampered efforts to identify wild reservoirs for nearly 40 years. Using a machine learning algorithm, generalized boosted regression, we characterize potential filovirus-positive bat species with estimated 87% accuracy. Our model produces two specific outputs with immediate utility for guiding filovirus surveillance in the wild. First, we report a profile of intrinsic traits that discriminates hosts from non-hosts, providing a biological caricature of a filovirus-positive bat species. This profile emphasizes traits describing adult and neonate body sizes and rates of reproductive fitness, as well as species’ geographic range overlap with regions of high mammalian diversity. Second, we identify several bat species ranked most likely to be filovirus-positive on the basis of intrinsic trait similarity with known filovirus-positive bats. New bat species predicted to be positive for filoviruses are widely distributed outside of equatorial Africa, with a majority of species overlapping in Southeast Asia. Taken together, these results spotlight several potential host species and geographical regions as high-probability targets for future filovirus surveillance. Public Library of Science 2016-07-14 /pmc/articles/PMC4945033/ /pubmed/27414412 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0004815 Text en © 2016 Han et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Han, Barbara A. Schmidt, John Paul Alexander, Laura W. Bowden, Sarah E. Hayman, David T. S. Drake, John M.
spellingShingle	Han, Barbara A. Schmidt, John Paul Alexander, Laura W. Bowden, Sarah E. Hayman, David T. S. Drake, John M. Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses
author_facet	Han, Barbara A. Schmidt, John Paul Alexander, Laura W. Bowden, Sarah E. Hayman, David T. S. Drake, John M.
author_sort	Han, Barbara A.
title	Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses
title_short	Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses
title_full	Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses
title_fullStr	Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses
title_full_unstemmed	Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses
title_sort	undiscovered bat hosts of filoviruses
description	Ebola and other filoviruses pose significant public health and conservation threats by causing high mortality in primates, including humans. Preventing future outbreaks of ebolavirus depends on identifying wildlife reservoirs, but extraordinarily high biodiversity of potential hosts in temporally dynamic environments of equatorial Africa contributes to sporadic, unpredictable outbreaks that have hampered efforts to identify wild reservoirs for nearly 40 years. Using a machine learning algorithm, generalized boosted regression, we characterize potential filovirus-positive bat species with estimated 87% accuracy. Our model produces two specific outputs with immediate utility for guiding filovirus surveillance in the wild. First, we report a profile of intrinsic traits that discriminates hosts from non-hosts, providing a biological caricature of a filovirus-positive bat species. This profile emphasizes traits describing adult and neonate body sizes and rates of reproductive fitness, as well as species’ geographic range overlap with regions of high mammalian diversity. Second, we identify several bat species ranked most likely to be filovirus-positive on the basis of intrinsic trait similarity with known filovirus-positive bats. New bat species predicted to be positive for filoviruses are widely distributed outside of equatorial Africa, with a majority of species overlapping in Southeast Asia. Taken together, these results spotlight several potential host species and geographical regions as high-probability targets for future filovirus surveillance.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2016
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4945033/
_version_	1613609434671480832

Undiscovered Bat Hosts of Filoviruses

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