The evolution and emergence of hantaviruses

Curr Opin Virol. 2015 Feb;10:27-33. doi: 10.1016/j.coviro.2014.12.007.

Edward C Holmes ¹, Yong-Zhen Zhang ²

Affiliations

1 Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, Charles Perkins Centre, School of Biological Sciences and Sydney Medical School, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia; State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Department of Zoonoses, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Changping, Beijing, China. Electronic address: edward.holmes@sydney.edu.au.
2 State Key Laboratory for Infectious Disease Prevention and Control, Collaborative Innovation Center for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases, Department of Zoonoses, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Changping, Beijing, China.

PMID: 25562117 DOI: 10.1016/j.coviro.2014.12.007

Abstract

Hantaviruses are a major class of zoonotic pathogens and cause a variety of severe diseases in humans. For most of the last 50 years rodents have been considered to be the primary hosts of hantaviruses, with hantavirus evolution thought to reflect a process of virus-rodent co-divergence over a time-scale of millions of years, with occasional spill-over into humans. However, recent discoveries have revealed that hantaviruses infect a more diverse range of mammalian hosts, particularly Chiroptera (bats) and Soricomorpha (moles and shrews), and that cross-species transmission at multiple scales has played an important role in hantavirus evolution. As a consequence, the evolution and emergence of hantaviruses is more complex than previously anticipated, and may serve as a realistic model for Other viral groups.

Name
Email *

	Sorry, but the email address you supplied was invalid.