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. 2013 Nov 27;5(12):2920-30.
doi: 10.3390/v5122920.

First isolation of a giant virus from wild Hirudo medicinalis leech: Mimiviridae isolation in Hirudo medicinalis

Mondher Boughalmi  1 , Isabelle Pagnier, Sarah Aherfi, Philippe Colson, Didier Raoult, Bernard La Scola
Affiliations

First isolation of a giant virus from wild Hirudo medicinalis leech: Mimiviridae isolation in Hirudo medicinalis

Mondher Boughalmi et al. Viruses. .

Abstract

Giant viruses and amoebae are common in freshwater, where they can coexist with other living multicellular organisms. We screened leeches from the species Hirudo medicinalis for giant viruses. We analyzed five H. medicinalis obtained from Tunisia (3) and France (2). The leeches were decontaminated and then dissected to remove internal parts for co-culture with Acanthamoeba polyphaga. The genomes of isolated viruses were sequenced on a 454 Roche instrument, and a comparative genomics analysis was performed. One Mimivirus was isolated and the strain was named Hirudovirus. The genome assembly generated two scaffolds, which were 1,155,382 and 25,660 base pairs in length. Functional annotations were identified for 47% of the genes, which corresponds to 466 proteins. The presence of Mimividae in the same ecological niche as wild Hirudo may explain the presence of the mimivirus in the digestive tract of the leech, and several studies have already shown that viruses can persist in the digestive tracts of leeches fed contaminated blood. As leeches can be used medically and Mimiviruses have the potential to be an infectious agent in humans, patients treated with leeches should be surveyed to investigate a possible connection.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Aspect of agar plate on which samples were inoculated. (a) negative control, (b) Hirudovirus starin growth leading to lysis of amoebas.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Hirudo medicinalis in which Hirudovirus strain was isolated.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Typical aspect if Hirudovirus virus factory (VF) growing in A. polyphaga.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Genomic dotplot between Mimivirus and Hirudovirus pairs of orthologs by BLASTp analysis. The diameter of the circles is proportional with the BLASTp bit score. The arrow indicates the position between the two contigs.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Maximum likelihood phylogeny reconstruction based on a concatenated alignment of the VVA18 helicase, the DNA polymerase B family and the VV-A32 packaging ATPase. Phylogeny reconstruction was performed using the MEGA5 software on a total of 1835 positions in the final dataset. Bootstrap values (as a result of 1,000 replicates) are shown as percentages next to the branches. A discrete Gamma distribution was used to model evolutionary rate differences among sites. The tree is drawn to scale, with branch lengths measured in the number of substitutions per site.
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