Elsevier

Virology

Volume 521, August 2018, Pages 175-180
Virology

Adventitious viruses persistently infect three commonly used mosquito cell lines

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2018.06.007Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • dsRNA is readily detectable in commonly used mosquito cell culture systems.

  • Metagenomic analysis reveals that Hsu, Aag2 and U4.4 cells are persistently infected.

  • RNAi-deficient C6/36 cells do not appear to harbor viruses.

Abstract

Mosquito cell lines have been used extensively in research to isolate and propagate arthropod-borne viruses and understand virus-vector interactions. Despite their utility as an in vitro tool, these cell lines are poorly defined and may harbor insect-specific viruses. Accordingly, we screened four commonly-used mosquito cell lines, C6/36 and U4.4 cells from Aedes albopictus, Aag2 cells from Aedes aegypti, and Hsu cells from Culex quinquefasciatus, for the presence of adventitious (i.e. exogenous) viruses. All four cell lines stained positive for double-stranded RNA, indicative of RNA virus replication. We subsequently identified viruses infecting Aag2, U4.4 and Hsu cell lines using untargeted next-generation sequencing, but not C6/36 cells. PCR confirmation revealed that these sequences stem from active viral replication and/or integration into the cellular genome. Our results show that these commonly-used mosquito cell lines are persistently-infected with several viruses. This finding may be critical to interpreting data generated in these systems.

Keywords

Mosquito
Virus
Cell culture
Insect-specific viruses

Cited by (0)

1

These authors contributed equally.

2

Present address: Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 360 W Campus Drive, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA.

3

Present address: Department of Immunology and Microbial Science, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA.