Diversity and structure of pollinator-virus communities from metatranscriptomes

There is increasing concern about insects and pollinator decline in Europe but little is known about the role of infectious diseases.

Research to date, focusing only on a few virus or insect taxa, has left us with a poor understanding of the processes shaping virus ecosystems and driving host-shifts in wild populations, while thousands of new viruses have been recently discovered in insects.

Together with two participating researchers and a lab technician, we will build on our joint expertise in epidemiology, macroecology, community ecology and network ecology to disentangle the diversity and structure of insect-virus communities across Europe.

By performing a sampling campaign across multiple countries, we will use metatranscriptomics to characterise the microbiomes (including viruses) of butterflies. Using new analytical pipelines, we will generate individual infectious profiles, capturing even undescribed viruses.

The approach of sampling entire communities of butterflies will further allow us to build ecosystem level networks of butterfly-virus interactions, providing unprecedented knowledge on virus prevalence, patterns of virus co-infections and host specificity within and across communities. This data and knowledge will be integrated to reconstruct the history of butterfly virus co-evolution.

Understanding past evolution and processes of host-shifts can improve our models for the future, including the prediction of emerging infectious diseases.