Genomic Characterization of the First Parechovirus in Bats

As important hosts for several pathogenic viruses, bats harbor viruses from almost all families of vertebrate viruses, including several genera of family Picornaviridae, including Hepatovirus, Kobuvirus, Crohivirus, and Sapelovirus ( Drexler et al. 2015 ; Wu et al. 2016 ; Yinda et al. 2017 ). However, PeVs were not reported in bats until our recent viral metagenomic analysis of 122 adult healthy bats (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) obtained from two locations in Xinjiang (Xinyuan, n = 46; Qapqal, n = 76) in 2016, revealing thousands of reads related to PeV ( Zhang et al. 2018 ). PCR-based screening revealed that 6.5% and 10.5% bats from Xinyuan and Qapqal, respectively, harbored this virus, and preliminary phylogenetic analysis of 396-nt-long amplicons targeting the VP1 region (GenBank accession numbers: MH921430–MH921443) revealed > 91.5% identities among each other and 63.7%–64.2% identity with their closest phylogenetic neighbor, FPeV ( Smits et al. 2013 ; Zhang et al. 2018 ). This study reports the complete genomic characterization of the first bat PeV to better understand its evolutionary history.