Scientist's cat helps discover a rare virus — yet again

A scientist's cat shot to fame last year for his role in the discovery of the United States' first-known jeilongvirus. Now, the feline has replicated his success by fetching yet another animal containing a never-before-seen bug.

The newfound virus was found in a dead Everglades short-tailed shrew (Blarina peninsulae), which Pepper the cat brought home following a successful hunting trip near his home in Gainesville, Florida. John Lednicky, Pepper's owner and a virologist at the University of Florida, retrieved his pet's catch and took it to the lab for testing.

The results revealed that the shrew carried a never-before-seen strain of Orthoreovirus — a poorly understood viral genus that's known to infect birds and various mammals, including humans, white-tailed deer and bats. Lednicky and his colleagues published their findings June 10 in the journal Microbiology Resource Announcements.

"The bottom line is we need to pay attention to orthoreoviruses, and know how to rapidly detect them," Lednicky said in a statement. That's because there have been reported cases of them causing serious illness in humans.

First discovered in the 1950s, orthoreoviruses spread through poop or inhaled droplets and typically infect the respiratory or intestinal tracts of their hosts.

They were named "orphan viruses" because they were not initially associated with any known diseases — meaning scientists thought they didn't cause any serious conditions. Since then, though, orthoreoviruses have been linked to rare cases of brain swelling (encephalitis), swelling of the tissues over the brain's surface (meningitis) and inflammation of the digestive tract (gastroenteritis) in children, the statement noted.

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After isolating the virus from the dead shrew, Lednicky and his colleagues analyzed the virus' genome and discovered it was a new strain, which they named Gainesville shrew mammalian orthoreovirus type 3 strain UF-1.

The existence of the new strain is unsurprising, because viruses constantly evolve and generate new strains. One way new strains can emerge is that two different viruses can infect a host cell at the same time and then swap genes, Lednicky noted.

"I'm not the first one to say this, but essentially, if you look, you'll find, and that's why we keep finding all these new viruses," Lednicky said.

Researchers still have many questions about orthoreoviruses, including how often they infect humans and animals, how sick they could make us, and all the ways they can spread. For instance, orthoreoviruses with nearly identical genes to one another have been found in deer in the U.S., farmed mink in China, and a lion in Japan, raising the possibility that they may have been transmitted through feedstock made by the same manufacturer.

The researchers say their next steps will be exposing the virus to blood serum of potential hosts and running immunology studies to better understand the threats the newfound strain may pose to humans and wildlife. For the moment, "not enough is known about this recently identified virus to be concerned," study lead author Emily DeRuyter, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, said in the statement.

As for Pepper, the virologists say he has shown no signs of illness and will continue to contribute to scientific research through his hunting.

"This was an opportunistic study," Lednicky said. "If you come across a dead animal, why not test it instead of just burying it? There is a lot of information that can be gained."