Résumé
Aim: Emerging infectious diseases arising from pathogen spillover from
mammals to humans comprise a substantial health threat. Tracing virus
origin and predicting the most likely host species for future spillover
events are major objectives in One Health disciplines. We assessed
patterns of virus sharing among a large diversity of mammals, including
humans and domestic species. Location: Global. Time period: Current. Major
taxa studied: Mammals and associated viruses. Methods: We used network
centrality analysis and trait-based Bayesian hierarchical models to
explore patterns of virus sharing among mammals. We analysed a global
database that compiled the associations between 1,785 virus species and
725 mammalian host species as sourced from automatic screening of
meta-data accompanying published nucleotide sequences between 1950 – 2019.
Results: We show that based on current evidence, domesticated mammals hold
the most central positions in networks of known mammal-virus associations.
Among entire host-virus networks, Carnivora and Chiroptera hold central
positions for mainly sharing RNA viruses, while Ungulates hold central
positions for sharing both RNA and DNA viruses with other host species. We
revealed strong evidence that DNA viruses were phylogenetically more host
specific than RNA viruses. RNA viruses exhibited low functional host
specificity despite an overall tendency to infect phylogenetically related
species, signifying high potential to shift across hosts with different
ecological niches. The frequencies of sharing viruses among hosts and the
proportion of zoonotic viruses in hosts were larger for RNA than DNA
viruses. Main conclusions: Acknowledging the role of domestic species in
addition to host and virus traits in patterns of virus sharing is
necessary to improve our understanding of virus spread and spillover in
times of global change. Understanding multi-host virus sharing pathways
adds focus to curtail disease spread.