Cornelius Ruhs E, Chia WN, Foo R, Peel AJ, Li Y, Larman HB, Irving AT, Wang L, Brook CE. *Frontiers in Public Health* · September 22, 2023 · DOI: [10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212018](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212018) How to cite ### AMA Cornelius Ruhs E, Chia WN, Foo R, et al. Applications of VirScan to broad serological profiling of bat reservoirs for emerging zoonoses. Front Public Health. 2023;11:1212018. doi:10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212018 ### APA ``` Cornelius Ruhs, E., Chia, W. N., Foo, R., Peel, A. J., Li, Y., Larman, H. B., Irving, A. T., Wang, L., & Brook, C. E. (2023). Applications of VirScan to broad serological profiling of bat reservoirs for emerging zoonoses. Frontiers in Public Health, 11, 1212018. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212018 ``` ### BibTeX ``` @article{corneliusruhs2023virscanbats, author = {Cornelius Ruhs, Emily and Chia, Wan Ni and Foo, Randy and Peel, Alison J. and Li, Yimei and Larman, H. Benjamin and Irving, Aaron T. and Wang, Linfa and Brook, Cara E.}, title = {Applications of {VirScan} to broad serological profiling of bat reservoirs for emerging zoonoses}, journal = {Frontiers in Public Health}, volume = {11}, pages = {1212018}, year = {2023}, doi = {10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212018} } ``` The first published application of Phage ImmunoPrecipitation Sequencing (PhIP-Seq) to bat serum, this study repurposes the human-virome VirScan library — without species-specific reagent redesign — to recover broad antibody-exposure histories in two bat species. The result establishes virome-scale antibody reactome profiling as a hypothesis-free complement to PCR-based pathogen surveillance in zoonotic reservoirs. [ Read publication at Frontiers in Public Health ](https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1212018) In this publication: - 57 viral genera detected in semi-captive *Pteropus alecto* — including betacoronaviruses, henipaviruses, lyssaviruses, and filoviruses — with 9 genera in captive *Eonycteris spelaea*. - The VirScan human-virome peptide library, applied unmodified, recovered biologically plausible exposures in both bat species — demonstrating cross-species reuse without reagent redesign. - Total peptide hits and inferred exposure counts correlated with bat age and with poorer body condition scores, paralleling age-exposure curves seen in human VirScan cohorts. - For several viruses, age-seroprevalence patterns deviated from the textbook "lifelong immunizing infection" model, suggesting more complex transmission dynamics than current frameworks assume. Bats host an unusually large number of viruses that can spill over into humans and cause severe disease — Hendra and Nipah henipaviruses, Marburg filovirus, rabies lyssavirus, and many coronaviruses among them — yet bats themselves rarely show clinical illness from these infections. Surveying which viruses any given bat population has been exposed to is hard: viral shedding is transient, traditional ELISA and virus-neutralization assays test only one antigen at a time, and field capture is logistically difficult. This paper introduces a different approach. The authors took serum from two bat species — semi-captive Australian black flying foxes (*Pteropus alecto*) and captive Singaporean cave nectar bats (*Eonycteris spelaea*) — and ran each sample through the VirScan PhIP-Seq library, a bacteriophage-displayed collection of 56-mer peptides covering more than 200 viral species and 1,000 strains across the entire known human virome. By measuring which peptides each bat's antibodies bound, they recovered a per-bat fingerprint of past viral exposures, then deconvoluted those fingerprints with the AVARDA algorithm to assign exposures to specific viral genera. Despite the library being human-designed, the assay surfaced biologically plausible exposure histories: 57 viral genera in *P. alecto* and 9 in *E. spelaea*, including expected zoonotic groups. Pre-pandemic biosurveillance gains a virome-scale lever: a single PhIP-Seq run against the full human virome turns banked serum aliquots into hypothesis-free spillover-risk readouts, generalizable beyond *Homo sapiens* to mammalian reservoirs across One Health programs. 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