A systematic review on current approaches in bat virus discovered between 2018 and 2022.

Zoonotic viruses are widely seen as the primary threat for future pandemics. Bats are the most diverse group of mammals, with more than 1400 species distributed across most habitats on Earth. So far, 31 known virus families were associated with bats, although the understanding of most viruses were insufficient. Continuous efforts to discover, understand and monitor these bats viruses, is thereby an area of public health interest. This systematic review was designed to catalogue publications reporting novel bat virus discoveries within PubMed, SCOPUS, and Web of Science databases, within a 5-year period from 2018 to 2022. Various experimental parameters, including sampling locations, methodology, bat species diversity, similarity to known viruses, species demarcation of new viruses, and genomic sequencing strategies, were extracted from 41 publications and analyzed. In total, 72 novel viruses from 19 virus families were identified between 2018 and 2022, particularly from Genomoviridae (DNA viruses) and Coronaviridae (RNA viruses). That said, only a limited number of bat families featured extensively despite noticeable shift towards next generation sequencing methods and metagenomics pipeline for virus identification across different sampling methods. This review aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the global efforts made over the past five years to identify and characterize emerging viruses in bat species, and to provide a detailed overview of the current technologies and methodologies used in these studies.

ChiroVox: a public library of bat calls.

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 for areas with high biodiversity. The ChiroVox website (https://www.chirovox.org) was created to facilitate the sharing of bat sound recordings together with their metadata, including biodiversity data and recording circumstances. To date, more than 30 researchers have contributed over 3,900 recordings of nearly 200 species, making ChiroVox the largest open-access bat call library currently available. Each recording has a unique identifier that can be cited in publications; hence the acoustic analyses are repeatable. Most of the recordings available through the website are from bats whose species identities are confirmed, so they can be used to determine species in recordings where the bats were not captured or could not be identified. We hope that with the help of the bat researcher community, the website will grow rapidly and will serve as a solid source for bat acoustic research and monitoring.

The systematic position of Hypsugo macrotis (Chiroptera: Vespertilionidae) and a new record from Peninsular Malaysia.

The Southeast Asian species of Hypsugo are rare bats, except for H. cadornae and H. pulveratus, which are distributed throughout the Indomalayan region. Hypsugo macrotis is restricted to Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Java and adjacent islands, and is known only from a handful of specimens. Here we report a new locality record of the species from Seremban, Peninsular Malaysia, which also represents the first known building-dweller colony of any Hypsugo from the region. We discuss the taxonomic status of two morphologically similar species, H. macrotis and H. vordermanni, and provide the first COI and cyt b gene sequences for H. macrotis and reconstruct the species' phylogenetic relationships.