What is it about?
How do viruses survive in very different hosts? We show that rabies virus, a lethal pathogen, needs different transmission rates to establish itself in two hosts with very different population densities (arctic fox and raccoon). This difference is associated with differences in the virus's ability to inhibit a brain receptor that is associated with behavior changes in mice and aggressive behavior in several models. Rabies virus variants are adapted to different hosts and change behavior in animals they infect. We suggest that the rabies virus evolved to change the behavior in animals in a way that is adapted to each host. In Arctic foxes that survive in the far north with very low densities, it needs to transmit more easily to not die out, while in raccoons that can have very high population densities, it is adapted to not transmit too much to not kill too many hosts.
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Why is it important?
This work is important to better understand how viruses survive long-term in different hosts.
Perspectives
This article is the result of the work of a multidisiplinary team including neuroscietists, disease ecologists and a mathematicin working on genetic trees.
Karsten Hueffer
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Virus transmission required for maintenance and host adaptation mirrors neurophysiological differences in rabies-derived peptides, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, October 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2618744123.
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