Discovering the world of bats

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

Emerging infectious diseases pose an extreme risk for animal populations. In the early 2000s, the Lloviu virus (LLOV) presumably caused mass mortalities in Schreiber’s bat population in Spain, Portugal, and France. After more than a decade, LLOV re-emerged in 2016 in Hungary along with two additional possibly connected mass mortality events from 2013 to 2016.

Our article has just been published in PeerJ about the ChiroVox website! Recordings of bat echolocation and social calls are used for many research purposes from ecological studies to taxonomy. Effective use of these relies on identification of species from the recordings, but comparative recordings or detailed call descriptions to support identification are often lacking

Recently, many good news came to me regarding grant and fellowship applications. My proposal “Molecular evolution of bat-borne viruses and their hosts” got funding from the National Research, Development and Innovation Office. Bat-borne viruses became one of the leading topics in virus research after the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s. The COVID-19 pandemic further

Filoviruses are prime examples of emerging human pathogens that are transmitted to humans by zoonotic spillover events. Since their initial discovery, filovirus outbreaks have occured with increasing frequency and intensity. There is an urgent need to better understand their enzootic ecology and pathogenic potential, given recent zoonotic virus spillover events including the 2013-2016 West African

Our article on the revision of small-sized Myotinae bats from the Himalayas has been published in Mammalian Biology.The systematics status of the constituent species of the M. mystacinus morphogroup in the Himalayan region has long been marred by uncertainty. Lack of integrative studies combining morphological and genetic data from specimens recently collected in this region

Our new article about the two Asian species, Scotophilus heathii and S. kuhlii just went online: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author/E9VJJIXJUCRV9AB5HB5Y?target=10.1111/jzs.12448 Yellow house bats (Scotophilus) have been known for centuries as a widespread genus of vesper bats in the Indomalayan Region. Despite this, their taxonomic status and phylogeographical patterns remain unclear due to differing criteria employed by early taxonomists