Bats, bacteria and their role in health and disease

Abstract

Bats are ancient and among the most diverse mammals in terms of species richness, diet and habitat preferences, characteristics that may contribute to a high diversity of infectious agents. During the past two decades, the interest in bats and their microorganisms largely increased because of their role as reservoir hosts or carriers of important pathogens. Rapid advances in microbial detection and characterisation by high-throughput sequencing technologies have led to large genetic data sets but also improved our possibilities and speed of identifying unknown infectious agents. Assessing the risk of infectious diseases in bats and their pathological manifestation, however, is still challenging because of limited access to appropriate material and field data, and continuing limitations in wildlife diagnostics and the interpretation of genetic results. As a consequence, emerging pathogens can suddenly appear with devastating effects as happened for the white nose syndrome. To date, much research on bats and infectious agents still focusses on viruses, whilst the knowledge on bacteria and their role in disease is comparatively low.