Last year Pepper, a pet cat who wanders the yards of Gainesville, Florida, helped a scientist discover a new viral stress. Now the fur feline has returned to it again.
In a new study, scientists again discovered an exotic virus infectious dead rodent, who was captured by pepper. This time around, Pepper’s hit hunting helped researchers identify unidentified orthoreovirus stress, a kind of virus that infects humans and other mammals. The findings, and the complete genome of the virus, are published in the newspaper Microbiological letters.
John Lednicky, the owner of Pepper and the main author of the study, is a microbiologist at the University of Florida and hunts viruses much like Pepper Hunts rodents. It was Lednicky, who brought Pepper’s fresh capture in the lab for testing.
His analysis revealed that the rodent, Everglades short-tailed Shew, had previously carried an unidentified stress of orthoreovirus. These types of viruses can infect humans and other mammals, but scientists still don’t know much about their effects on humans. However, there were some rare cases of encephalitis, meningitis and gastrointeritis related to the virus in children. The new viral stress is officially known as “Gainesville Shrew Mammalian Orthoreovirus Type 3 Strain UF-1.”
Ortoreoviruses mute quickly. Much like the flu -virus, two different types of orthoreovirus can infect a single host cell. This means that the two viral tensions mix their genomes within the cell, essentially creating a new virus.
“The bottom line is that we have to pay attention to orthoreoviruses and know how to quickly detect them,” Lednicky said in a Statement.
Pepper Last contribution to science It was in May 2021, when he brought home a joint cotton mouse carrying a kind of jeilulongvirus never before seen in the United States unlike ortoreoviruses, jeilulongvirus infects reptiles, fish and birds in addition to mammals. It can also sometimes cause serious illness in humans. That Study was published last year.
Since then, Lednicky has also hard to work by identifying other new viruses. He adds that it is not too wonderful to find a new viral stress, as viruses mute quickly. “I’m not the first to say this, but basically, if you look, you find, and that’s why we still find all these new viruses,” Lednicky said in a statement.
Next, the researchers plan to continue to study the exotic virus to understand if it pose a threat to humans and pets. But the virus pointed no threat to pepper, at least, who did not show any signs of disease and again do field work.
“This was an opportunistic study,” Lednicky said in a statement. “If you meet a dead animal, why not test it instead of just burying it? There is a lot of information available.”
