212 Ebola .../plant host

[Ed Rybicki]

> From:          fmzerbini at ucdavis.edu (Francisco Muril Zerbini)
> Subject:       Re: 212 Ebola messages in my mailbox...

> On Sun, 14 May 1995, Patrick O'Neil wrote:
> 
> > Thanks, an informative post and it also had the benefit of relieving some 
> > of the fool factor for suggestion plant-to-animal transfer.  The thought 
...
> I wonder how many insects were tested. Can you imagine how many 
> undescribed species of insects are hidden in the rainforest ? 
> 
> I don't want anybody to get the impression that I think Ebola's natural
> host is a plant. As I said in my previous post, it's just an idea I like
> to entertain, and it's not impossible given what we know about
> plant/animal viruses and plant molecular biology. Who knows... 
...
> rainforest that we don't know about ?). But really, my best guess is that 
> Ebola is an insect virus. 
Less unlikely than you might suppose...you noted tomato spotted wilt 
was a member of the Bunyaviridae, most of whose members are animal 
viruses (such as Hantaviruses).  You might also have noted 
Tenuiviruses, which are long filamentous jobs found in plants, which 
are related (from sequence data) to Phleboviruses: which according to my 6th Report of the ICTV, are also 
Bunyaviridae.  The particles resemble the naked nucleocapsids of the 
ordinarily-enveloped Phlebovirus particles.  The viruses are 
transmitted persistently by leafhoppers, presumably replicating in 
them (this is not yet clear apparently), and it is not known whether 
they look more like Phleboviruses in the insect or not.  Now it may 
be a long step from a virus of plants and leafhoppers to a virus of 
plants and an unnamed insect virus that infects humans and monkeys, 
but...  Tomato spotted wilt, as pointed out earlier, remarkably nasty 
to a wide range of plants, as well as infecting the vector thrips 
from which it presumably hopped by some mutational change, to plants. 
 No real reason why a similar virus couldn't make a hop to animals, 
given that plants are no more closely related evolutionarily to 
insects than they are to vertebrates.

 ______________________________________________________
 |     Ed Rybicki, PhD      |  ed at molbiol.uct.ac.za   |
 |    Dept Microbiology     | University of Cape Town |
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