Discovering the world of bats

Our new article about the cryptic hybridization in Myotis nattereri published in Molecular Ecology! Proud to be part of this huge work done by the colleagues! The characterization of cryptic hybrid zones with genome-wide analysis is in its early stages and offers new perspectives for studying population admixture and thus the impact of gene flow.

Our new Horizon program “One Health approach to understand, predict and prevent viral emergencies from bats” starts with the National Laboratory of Virology, University of Pécs and several other fantastic partner institutions! In recent years, several novel RNA viruses found in bats have been associated to the emergence of human diseases. Surveillance in this extremely

Nagyszerű hírek érkeztek az NKFIH háza tájáról, mindhárom OTKA pályázat nyert, melyben résztvevő kutatóként szerepet vállaltam:Kemenesi Gábor: Lloviu cuevavírus: egy ígéretes modell a denevér eredetű humánpatogén filovírusok megértéséhez (Pécsi Tudományegyetem)Zsebők Sándor: Napelemek és a denevérek: érzékelési, viselkedési és ökológiai vizsgálatok – az élővilág-barát megújuló energiáért (Ökológiai Kutatóközpont)Lanszki József: Mit árulhat el egyetlen faj a környezeti

With French and Vietnamese colleagues we studied the coronavirus diversity of horseshoe bats (Rhinolophus spp.) in Vietnam. Previous studies have described many coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV (SARSCoVr) in China and only a few coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2 (SARSCoV2r) in Yunnan, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. In our preprint we report the results of several field missions

Lloviu cuevavirus (LLOV) was the first identified member of Filoviridae family outside the Ebola and Marburgvirus genera. A massive die-off of Schreibers’s bats (Miniopterus schreibersii) in the Iberian Peninsula in 2002 led to its initial discovery. Recent studies with recombinant and wild-type LLOV isolates confirmed the zoonotic nature of the virus in vitro. We examined bat samples from Italy for the presence

Our new paper about the circovirus diversity of bats from all around the world. We screened 424 bat samples (80 species) from eight countries from four continents (Namibia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Vietnam, Mexico, Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia) with the help of great local researchers. In the family Circoviridae, 71 new species have

Our article on ChiroVox, the largest public bat call library was one of the top5 most viewed articles in Biodiversity, Bioinformatics and Ecology section of PeerJ. What a great news! 🙂

Canine morbillivirus (canine distemper virus, CDV) is a member of the Paramyxoviridae family and it is a serious viral disease that affects many mammalian species, including members of the Mustelidae family. Road-killed mustelids belonging to six species were tested with RT-PCR and three species were positive for viral RNA, 2 out of 64 Steppe polecats

The filovirus Lloviu virus (LLOV), was identified in 2002 in Schreiber’s bats (Miniopterus schreibersii) in Spain and was subsequently detected in bats in Hungary. We isolated infectious LLOV from the blood of a live sampled Schreiber’s bat in Hungary and published our results in an article in Nature Communications. The isolate could also infect monkey