Rory Gibb, Greg Albery, Nardus Mollentze, Evan Eskew, Liam Brierley, Sadie Ryan, Steph Seifert, Colin Carlson
January 2022
Biology Letters
While host-virus association data form the backbone of a growing body of comparative work in virus ecology and evolution, knowledge of the wildlife virome is inherently constrained by historical discovery effort. This has led to concern about the reliability of conclusions drawn from currently-available data. By analysing a dataset of discovery dates for 6,571 unique mammal host-virus associations, we show that inference of relative viral richness across host species has been unstable over time. We therefore advise caution to avoid overinterpreting patterns in current data.
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