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Genetic diversity of RNA viruses infecting invertebrate pests of rice

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Abstract

Invertebrate species are a natural reservoir of viral genetic diversity, and invertebrate pests are widely distributed in crop fields. However, information on viruses infecting invertebrate pests of crops is limited. In this report, we describe the deep metatranscriptomic sequencing of 88 invertebrate samples covering all major invertebrate pests in rice fields. We identified 296 new RNA viruses and 13 known RNA viruses. These viruses clustered within 31 families, with many highly divergent viruses constituting potentially new families and genera. Of the identified viruses, 13 RNA viruses clustered within the Fiersviridae family of bacteriophages, and 48 RNA viruses clustered within families and genera of mycoviruses. We detected known rice viruses in novel invertebrate hosts at high abundances. Furthermore, some novel RNA viruses have genome structures closely matching to known plant viruses and clustered within genera of several plant virus species. Forty-five potential insect pathogenic RNA viruses were detected in invertebrate species. Our analysis revealed that host taxonomy plays a major role and geographical location plays an important role in structuring viral diversity. Cross-species transmission of RNA viruses was detected between invertebrate hosts. Newly identified viral genomes showed extensive variation for invertebrate viral families or genera. Together, the large-scale metatranscriptomic analysis greatly expands our understanding of RNA viruses in rice invertebrate species, the results provide valuable information for developing efficient strategies to manage insect pests and virus-mediated crop diseases.

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All viral genome sequences described in this study were deposited in the GenBank database under accession numbers (MZ209608-MZ210057). Raw sequence data reads are available at the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence SRA database under BioProject accession number (PRJNA629998).

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31972983, 32072487), the Key Technology R&D Program of Zhejiang Province (2021C02006), the Central Public-interest Scientific Institution Basal Research Fund (CPSIBRF-CNRRI-202115). We would like to thank D. Streicker for the prediction of viral hosts, we also thanks P. Krell and B. Meng for fruitful discussions and comments on the manuscript.

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Wang, H., Chao, S., Yan, Q. et al. Genetic diversity of RNA viruses infecting invertebrate pests of rice. Sci. China Life Sci. 67, 175–187 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-023-2398-y

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