In PLOS Pathogens, researchers from China and Australia describe a form of recombinant Rousettus bat coronavirus containing a gene that appears to have originated in the bat orthoreovirus. The team detected the new virus with a combination of sequencing and RT-PCR targeting pan-coronavirus sequence while screening bat samples. The virus, which turned up in rectal swab samples from the Rousettus leschenaulti bat, was most closely related to a single-stranded, positive-sense RNA virus called Rousettus bat coronavirus, but contained a p10 gene suspected of stemming from double-stranded segmented RNA viruses in the Reoviridae virus family.
A team from Brazil presents an analysis of microbial communities found in apical root samples from teeth that had been treated by root canal. As they report in PLOS One, the researchers did 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing on samples from 10 apical periodontitis-treated teeth in the hopes of finding microbes related to the development of post-treatment apical periodontitis. In the process, they identified bacterial from more than 500 operational taxonomic units falling in 11 phyla. Of those, microbes from four phyla and 14 genera were most common.
A PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases paper by Korean and American researchers outlines transcriptional patterns that seem to coincide with sex and developmental stage in the hermaphroditic parasitic flatworm Schistosoma mansoni. Through RNA sequencing on samples from five developmental stages, the team uncovered almost 7,200 genes that appear to be differentially expressed in male or female worms depending on their developmental stage — transcripts that were considered alongside chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing data for the histone mark H3K27me3. "Our work presents evidence that sexual differentiation in S. mansoni is accompanied by distinct male and female transcriptional landscapes of known players of the host-parasite crosstalk, developmental pathways, and epigenetic regulators," the authors write.