Metagenome analysis of viruses associated with Anopheles mosquitoes from Ramu Upazila, Cox's Bazar District, Bangladesh

Tao Li; Mohammad Shafiul Alam; Yu Yang; Hasan Mohammad Al-Amin; Mezanur Rahman; Farzana Islam; Matthew A Conte; Dana C Price; Jun Hang

doi:10.7717/peerj.19180

Metagenome analysis of viruses associated with Anopheles mosquitoes from Ramu Upazila, Cox's Bazar District, Bangladesh

PeerJ. 2025 Mar 31:13:e19180. doi: 10.7717/peerj.19180. eCollection 2025.

Authors

Tao Li¹, Mohammad Shafiul Alam², Yu Yang¹, Hasan Mohammad Al-Amin^{2

3}, Mezanur Rahman⁴, Farzana Islam⁴, Matthew A Conte¹, Dana C Price⁵, Jun Hang¹

Affiliations

¹ Viral Diseases Program, Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Silver Spring, Maryland, United States.
² Infectious Diseases Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Dhaka, Bangladesh.
³ School of the Environment, The University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.
⁴ Department of Zoology, Jagannath University, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
⁵ Department of Entomology, Center for Vector Biology, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States.

Abstract

Bangladesh has a warm climate and landscapes favourable for the proliferation of mosquitoes. Mosquito-borne pathogens including malaria and arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) remain a serious threat to the public health requiring constant vector control and disease surveillance. From November 2018 to April 2019, Anopheles mosquitoes were collected in three unions in the Ramu Upazila (sub-district) of Cox's Bazar District, Bangladesh. The mosquito specimens were combined into pools based on date of collection, household ID, and sex. Metagenome next-generation sequencing was conducted to elucidate diversity of virus sequences in each pool. Homology-based taxonomic classification and phylogenetic analyses identified a broad diversity of putative viruses from 12 known families, with additional unclassified viruses also likely present. Analysis of male mosquitoes showed some of these viruses are likely capable of being vertically transmitted. Moreover, many of the assembled virus sequences share homology and phylogenetic affinity with segments in sequenced Anopheles genomes, and may represent endogenous viral elements derived from a past evolutionary relationship between these putative viruses and their mosquito hosts.

Keywords: Arboviruses; Emerging diseases; Febrile vector-borne illness; Infectious diseases; Molecular epidemiology; Mosquitoes; Viral diseases; Zoonotic diseases.

MeSH terms

Animals
Anopheles* / virology
Bangladesh
Female
High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing
Male
Metagenome*
Mosquito Vectors* / virology
Phylogeny

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Global Emerging Infections Surveillance and Response System (GEIS), a Division of the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, projects P0157_23_WR and P0109_24_WR. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.