TY - JOUR
T1 - The enigma of picobirnaviruses
T2 - viruses of animals, fungi, or bacteria?
AU - Wang, David
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported in part by grant RC2DK11671 from the National Institutes of Health .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s)
PY - 2022/6
Y1 - 2022/6
N2 - Picobirnaviruses are small double-stranded RNA viruses first discovered in 1988 in stool samples from patients with diarrhea. It has generally been assumed that picobirnaviruses infect animal hosts and that they are potential agents of diarrhea, but there is still no direct evidence demonstrating that picobirnaviruses infect animals. In the metagenomic era, virome studies have broadened our understanding of picobirnavirus genetic diversity and genome organization, expanded the types of animals in which they have been detected, and identified novel associations with human disease. Most importantly, from the wealth of new sequencing data and comparative genomic analyses, a provocative new hypothesis has emerged that picobirnaviruses may not infect animals, but rather that they may infect evolutionarily simpler denizens of the gastrointestinal tract: bacteria and/or fungi. Depending on whether the true hosts of picobirnaviruses are animals, fungi, or bacteria, the mechanisms by which they impact animal biology will vary dramatically.
AB - Picobirnaviruses are small double-stranded RNA viruses first discovered in 1988 in stool samples from patients with diarrhea. It has generally been assumed that picobirnaviruses infect animal hosts and that they are potential agents of diarrhea, but there is still no direct evidence demonstrating that picobirnaviruses infect animals. In the metagenomic era, virome studies have broadened our understanding of picobirnavirus genetic diversity and genome organization, expanded the types of animals in which they have been detected, and identified novel associations with human disease. Most importantly, from the wealth of new sequencing data and comparative genomic analyses, a provocative new hypothesis has emerged that picobirnaviruses may not infect animals, but rather that they may infect evolutionarily simpler denizens of the gastrointestinal tract: bacteria and/or fungi. Depending on whether the true hosts of picobirnaviruses are animals, fungi, or bacteria, the mechanisms by which they impact animal biology will vary dramatically.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85130978792&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.coviro.2022.101232
DO - 10.1016/j.coviro.2022.101232
M3 - Review article
C2 - 35644066
AN - SCOPUS:85130978792
SN - 1879-6257
VL - 54
JO - Current Opinion in Virology
JF - Current Opinion in Virology
M1 - 101232
ER -