TY - JOUR

T1 - A two-step metagenomics approach for the identification and mitochondrial DNA contig assembly of vertebrate prey from the blood meals of common vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus)

AU - Chua, Physilia Y. S.

AU - Carøe, Christian

AU - Crampton-Platt, Alex

AU - Reyes-Avila, Claudia S.

AU - Jones, Gareth

AU - Streicker, Daniel G.

AU - Bohmann, Kristine

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 The authors.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - The feeding behaviour of the sanguivorous common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) facilitates the transmission of pathogens that can impact both human and animal health. To formulate effective strategies in controlling the spread of diseases, there is a need to obtain information on which animals they feed on. One DNA-based approach, shotgun sequencing, can be used to obtain such information. Even though it is costly, shotgun sequencing can be used to simultaneously retrieve prey and vampire bat mitochondrial DNA for population studies within one round of sequencing. However, due to the challenges of analysing shotgun sequenced metagenomic data such as false negatives/positives and typically low proportion of reads mapped to diet items, shotgun sequencing has not been used for the identification of prey from common vampire bat blood meals. To overcome these challenges and generate longer mitochondrial contigs which could be useful for prey population studies, we shotgun sequenced common vampire bat blood meal samples (n = 8) and utilised a two-step metagenomic approach based on combining existing bioinformatic workflows (alignment and mtDNA contig assembly) to identify prey. After validating our results from detections made through metabarcoding, we accurately identified the common vampire bats' prey in six out of eight samples without any false positives. We also generated prey mitochondrial contig lengths between 138 bp to 3231 bp (median = 770 bp, Q1 = 262 bp, Q3 = 1766 bp). This opens the potential to conduct phylogenetic and phylogeographic monitoring of elusive prey species in future studies, through the analyses of blood meal metagenomic data.

AB - The feeding behaviour of the sanguivorous common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) facilitates the transmission of pathogens that can impact both human and animal health. To formulate effective strategies in controlling the spread of diseases, there is a need to obtain information on which animals they feed on. One DNA-based approach, shotgun sequencing, can be used to obtain such information. Even though it is costly, shotgun sequencing can be used to simultaneously retrieve prey and vampire bat mitochondrial DNA for population studies within one round of sequencing. However, due to the challenges of analysing shotgun sequenced metagenomic data such as false negatives/positives and typically low proportion of reads mapped to diet items, shotgun sequencing has not been used for the identification of prey from common vampire bat blood meals. To overcome these challenges and generate longer mitochondrial contigs which could be useful for prey population studies, we shotgun sequenced common vampire bat blood meal samples (n = 8) and utilised a two-step metagenomic approach based on combining existing bioinformatic workflows (alignment and mtDNA contig assembly) to identify prey. After validating our results from detections made through metabarcoding, we accurately identified the common vampire bats' prey in six out of eight samples without any false positives. We also generated prey mitochondrial contig lengths between 138 bp to 3231 bp (median = 770 bp, Q1 = 262 bp, Q3 = 1766 bp). This opens the potential to conduct phylogenetic and phylogeographic monitoring of elusive prey species in future studies, through the analyses of blood meal metagenomic data.

KW - animal diet

KW - Desmodus rotundus

KW - high-throughput sequencing

KW - molecular ecology

KW - mtDNA assembly

KW - sanguivory

KW - shotgun sequencing

U2 - 10.3897/mbmg.6.78756

DO - 10.3897/mbmg.6.78756

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85129805571

VL - 6

SP - 75

EP - 87

JO - Metabarcoding and Metagenomics

JF - Metabarcoding and Metagenomics

SN - 2534-9708

ER -