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Article Dans Une Revue Peer Community Journal Année : 2023

African army ants at the forefront of virome surveillance in a remote tropical forest

Résumé

In this study, we used a predator-enabled metagenomics strategy to sample the virome of a remote and difficult-to-access densely forested African tropical region. Specifically, we focused our study on the use of army ants of the genus Dorylus that are obligate collective foragers and group predators that attack and overwhelm a broad array of animal prey. Using 209 army ant samples collected from 29 colonies and the virion-associated nucleic acid-based metagenomics approach, we showed that a broad diversity of bacterial, plant, invertebrate and vertebrate viral sequences were accumulated by army ants: including sequences from 157 different viral genera in 56 viral families. This suggests that using predators and scavengers such as army ants to sample broad swathes of tropical forest viromes can shed light on the composition and the structure of viral populations of these complex and inaccessible ecosystems.
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hal-04238904 , version 1 (12-10-2023)

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Matthieu Fritz, Bérénice Reggiardo, Denis Filloux, Lisa Claude, Emmanuel Fernandez, et al.. African army ants at the forefront of virome surveillance in a remote tropical forest: A groundbreaking study using ants revealed a spectacular diversity of viruses in hardly accessible ecosystems like tropical forests. Peer Community Journal, 2023, 3, ⟨10.24072/pci.infections.100077⟩. ⟨hal-04238904⟩
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