By Jill Pease
On a warm May day, an all-black domestic shorthair cat named Pepper entered his Gainesville, Florida, home and dropped a dead mouse on the carpet at his owner’s feet.
There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about Pepper’s behavior; he’s a skilled hunter who regularly leaves “gifts” for his humans. But Pepper’s owner had a different response than most of us. He’s John Lednicky, Ph.D., an expert in viruses and their transmission, including across species. Suspecting that mice may carry mule deerpox, Lednicky scooped up Pepper’s trophy and took it to his University of Florida lab for testing.
There, Lednicky and his team discovered that the rodent, a common cotton mouse, did not carry deerpox virus, but it did harbor a jeilongvirus, previously found in Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America. It comes from a family of viruses that infect mammals, reptiles, birds, and fish, and can occasionally cause serious illness in humans.
And this wasn’t just any jeilongvirus. It’s genetically much different from other jeilongviruses, Lednicky said.
“It grows equally well in rodent, human, and nonhuman primate (monkey) cells, making it a great candidate for a spillover event,” said Lednicky, a research professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions Department of Environmental and Global Health and a member of UF’s Emerging Pathogens Institute. A spillover event is when a virus moves from one species to another.
The virus, named Gainesville rodent jeilong virus 1 by the team, is the first jeilongvirus to be discovered in the U.S.
“We were not anticipating a virus of this sort, and the discovery reflects the realization that many viruses that we don’t know about circulate in animals that live in close proximity to humans. And indeed, were we to look, many more would be discovered,” said Emily DeRuyter, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Environmental and Global Health who specializes in One Health. She is also a Lednicky mentee and first author of the paper describing the virus’s discovery that appears in the journal Pathogens.
Read the full story in the UF Health newsroom.