Butterfly-virus nets
KEY POINTS- Sampling multiple butterfly communities across Europe
- Collaboration with virologists
- Disentangle the diversity and structure of insect-virus communities
Project overview
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Short summary
The ecological context of viral disease transmission dynamics is important yet poorly understood. We disentangle the diversity and structure of insect-virus communities across Europe.
Most insect virus research largely focuses on a limited number of viruses and insect taxa, leaving us with a poor understanding of the diversity of virus ecosystems and the processes driving host-shifts in wild populations.
In collaboration with virologists, we are combining the fields of epidemiology, macroecology, community ecology and network ecology to disentangle the diversity and structure of insect-virus communities across Europe.
We use metatranscriptomics to sequence the microbiome (including viruses) of individual insects to generate individual host-virus associations, and reconstruct a full virome of each individual.
We are sampling multiple butterfly communities across Europe to build community level networks of butterfly-virus interactions, providing unprecedented knowledge on virus prevalence, patterns of virus co-infections and host specificity within and across communities of insects in natural ecosystems.