Project description:Bats are natural hosts for a wide diversity of viruses. While many of these viruses are highly pathogenic in humans, most do not appear to cause major symptoms in bats. These modern bat-specific characteristics are the result of past virus-host (co)evolution and virus-driven host adaptations. Innate immunity is the first line of defense against viruses in mammals, we aim at characterizing bat innate immunity in response to viruses. Using genome-wide and gene candidate evolutionary analyses, we found that many bat antiviral genes have undergone multiple duplication events in a lineage-specific manner, specifically in the Myotis bat lineage. We focus on Myotis yumanensis as a model in the Myotis lineage. We performed transcriptomic analyses and observed the upregulation of most mammalian genes implicated in the different steps of the innate immune response from sensing to interferon-stimulated genes (ISGs), showing the conservation of the core innate immunity. Our study will contribute to identifying adaptations that shaped bat innate immunity. These adaptations may contribute to the bat-virus specificity and influence viral emergence to another mammalian host
