RESEARCH ARTICLE A Metagenomic Survey of Viral Abundance and Diversity in Mosquitoes from Hubei Province

Mosquitoes as one of the most common but important vectors have the potential to transmit or acquire a lot of viruses through biting, however viral flora in mosquitoes and its impact on mosquito-borne disease transmission has not been well investigated and evaluated. In this study, the metagenomic techniquehas been successfully employed in analyzing the abun-dance and diversity of viral community in three mosquito samples from Hubei, China. Among 92,304 reads produced through a run with 454 GS FLX system, 39 % have high simi-larities with viral sequences belonging to identified bacterial, fungal, animal, plant and insect viruses, and 0.02 % were classed into unidentified viral sequences, demonstrating high abundance and diversity of viruses in mosquitoes. Furthermore, two novel viruses in sub-family Densovirinae and family Dicistroviridae were identified, and six torque tenosus virus1 in family Anelloviridae, three porcine parvoviruses in subfamily Parvovirinae and a Culex tri-taeniorhynchus rhabdovirus in Family Rhabdoviridae were preliminarily characterized. The viral metagenomic analysis offered us a deep insight into the viral population of mosquito which played an important role in viral initiative or passive transmission and evolution during the process