Katherine Laiton-Donato, Instituto Nacional de Salud

Authors: Katherine Laiton-Donato1, José A. Usme-Ciro2, Eric Perdomo2,3, Andrew Muñoz2, Juan Domínguez3, Adalberto Diuca3, María Cristina Navas3, Lyda Castro4, Matthew Wong5, Nadim J. Ajami5, Dioselina Peláez-Carvajal1, Gabriel Parra-Henao2. Affiliations: 1 Grupo Genómica de Microorganismos Emergentes, Dirección de Investigación en Salud Pública, Instituto Nacional de Salud, Bogotá DC, Colombia. 2Centro de Investigación en Salud para el Trópico - CIST, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad Cooperativa de Colombia, Santa Marta, Colombia. 3 Grupo de Gastrohepatología, Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín, Colombia. 4 Grupo de Investigación Evolución, Sistemática y Ecología Molecular, Universidad del Magdalena, Santa Marta, Colombia. 5Alkek Center for Metagenomics and Microbiome Research, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, United States.

Discovering & Evolving

The emergence of arthropod-transmitted viruses (arboviruses) has been evidenced worldwide with the potential of pandemics. Colombia has been listed as a mega-diverse country for the immense variety of species and arboviruses to discover. Human intervention in rainforest facilitates new ecological interactions with sylvatic hosts and vectors are a critical determinant for arboviruses to adapt to humans.The objective of this study is to describe the virodiversity present in mosquitoes (Diptera: Culicidae) of the tropical rainforest of Colombia and its potential impact on public health, through deep sequencing, virological and computational methods.The methodological strategy developed in this research includes sampling in the rainforest of the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta, Colombia, using CDC, Shannon and active capture traps. Mosquito pools were homogenized, and an aliquot of the supernatant used for inoculation in C6 / 36 and Vero cells, while another was used directly for the extraction of viral RNA and subsequent sequencing by Illumina platform.A total of 2054 mosquitoes were collected, belonging to the species Anopheles(An.) pseudopunctipennis, An. punctimacula, Sabethes cyaneus, Sabethes chloropterus, Johnbelkinia ulopus, Wyeomyia pseudopecten, Psorophora ferox , Aedes aegypti, Aedes Ioliota, Culex sp., Manzonia sp., and Haemagogus sp. 133 pools were homogenized and inoculated on first and second pass. Supernatants were evaluated by RT-PCR for Alphavirus and Flavivirus. NGS was performed in VirMAP pipeline identified viruses that infect different species of arthropods, vertebrates and plants, including Wuhan Mosquito virus, Phasi charoen-like virus, Culex flavivirus, Wenzhou sobemo-like virus, luteovirus, sobemovirus and Hubei noda-like virus. In conclusion, the diversity of mosquitoes