Abstract
Mosquitoes are major infectious disease-carrying vectors. Assessment of current and future risks associated with the mosquito population requires knowledge of the full repertoire of pathogens they carry, including novel viruses, as well as their blood meal sources. Unbiased metatranscriptomic sequencing of individual mosquitoes offers a straightforward, rapid and quantitative means to acquire this information. Here, we profile 148 diverse wild-caught mosquitoes collected in California and detect sequences from eukaryotes, prokaryotes, 24 known and 46 novel viral species. Importantly, sequencing individuals greatly enhanced the value of the biological information obtained. It allowed us to a) speciate host mosquito, b) compute the prevalence of each microbe and recognize a high frequency of viral co-infections, c) associate animal pathogens with specific blood meal sources, and d) apply simple co-occurrence methods to recover previously undetected components of highly prevalent segmented viruses. In the context of emerging diseases, where knowledge about vectors, pathogens, and reservoirs is lacking, the approaches described here can provide actionable information for public health surveillance and intervention decisions.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
We have simplified the original manuscript. This involved deleting the results sections and asociated text and figures in the original manuscript related to 1) a novel approach to quanitify contribution of evolutionary novelty (CEN) and 2) detailed phylogeography of quaranjaviruses, and their associated Supplemental Data & Figures. In separate revisions, we 4) shifted original Figure 1 from the main text to Supplemental Figure 1, and created a new figure in its place and revised associated text; 5) substituted a simplified version of figure 2 and moved original figure 2 to Supplemental Figure 5, and revised associated text; and 6) merged 3 supplemental figures into a single figure that we moved to Figure 4, and revised associated text.
