Detection of Deformed wing virus (DWV) in the Vietnamese Walking Stick Medauroidea extradentata (Phasmatodea)

Deformed wing virus (DWV) is a single-stranded positive sense RNA virus which mainly infects honey bees (Apis mellifera) and can have devastating impacts on the colony. Recent studies have shown the presence of this virus in several species of Apis spp. and some other Hymenoptera, but our knowledge of their host range is very limited. We screened previously sequenced RNAseq libraries from different tissues of Vietnamese Walking Stick, Medauroidea extradentata (Phasmatodea) for DWV. We only found this virus in six libraries from anterior and posterior midgut tissue. From the midgut libraries we were able to construct the complete genome sequence of DWV, which consisted of 10,140 nucleotides and included one open reading frame. Pairwise genome comparison confirmed strong similarity (98.89%) of these assembled sequences with only 113 SNPs to the original DWV genome. Perhaps M. extradentata acquired this virus via a foodborne transmission by consuming DWV-infected material such as pollen or leaves contaminated with virus infected bee faeces.