ABOUT

  Rodents are most abundant and diversified order of living mammals in the world, representing about 43% of the total number of mammalian species. There are ca 2200 living rodent species, including mice, rats, voles, squirrels, prairie dogs, beavers, chipmunks, and guinea pigs.

  Rodents are known reservoirs of a range of human pathogens, including hantaviruses, Bartonella spp., and Leptospira interrogans, and also important reservoirs for the agents of a growing number of emerging infectious diseases with significant impacts on public health. Rodents exist in large populations in urban environments, where they live and feed in closer proximity to people. The frequent interactions of rodents with humans make them a common source of zoonotic infections. Rodents can spread pathogens to humans, e.g., by biting them or because human consume food products or water that is contaminated with rodent feces or urine, or we breathe in germs that are present in rodent excrements (e.g., hantaviruses). Rodent-borne pathogens can also be spread indirectly to humans. The rodents can serve as amplifying hosts of the pathogens and can bring them into direct contact with humans by mean of ectoparasitic arthropod vectors (ticks, mites, fleas). Moreover, Global climate change and changing human settlement patterns (especially in developing countries) could lead to increased problems with rodent-borne pathogens. Viral surveys in rodents have been identified a wide diversity of novel viruses from families and genera that contain important human pathogens, including new genotypes and species of cardioviruses, hepaciviruses, kobuviruses, parechoviruses, and sapoviruses.

  The Database of Rodent-associated Viruses (DRodVir) has been focused on exploring viral diversity in rodents. Our data provide a broad overview of rodent-associated health threats around the world. The study demonstrates the diversity of viruses carried by rodent species and highlights the need for improved pathogen surveillance and disease monitoring the urban environments, and indicates a need for increased surveillance and awareness of the disease risks associated with rodent infestation. The database is created to facilitate further studies by providing comprehensive, up-to-date, and well-curated information to the scientific community worldwide. By the user-friendly interface and online analytical tools DRodVir devotes to serve as a valuable platform for researchers.

  Molecular methods are now commonly used in the diagnosis and functional analyses of viruses; thus, DRodVir is built as a sequence-centric database. The DRodVir database is currently updated bimonthly to provide an overview and snapshot of the current research regarding rodent-associated MAMMAL viruses, which is essential now that the field is rapidly expanding.

  Please note the full contents and online tools of DRodVir database are now also available from the ZOVER platform with a largely improved interface. The new platform actually shares the same background dataset of DRodVir database. In addition, it provides a set of online visualization tools for comparative analyses on various zoonotic/vector-borne viruses. Although this interface of DRodVir database will remain publicly accessible for consistency, no further upgrade of the web interface will be available hereafter. Particularly, the statistical charts in DRodVir website were build upon Adobe Flash plugins. However, Adobe ended the support of Flash since 2021, so many modern web browsers disable Adobe Flash currently. Therefore, we highly recommend returning users of the DRodVir database switch to the new web interface of the ZOVER platform in the future.


QUICK START

  Known rodent-borne viruses:

  Commonly used model rodents:
  Simple query:
      Example: West Nile virus


UPDATE


PUBLICATION

  Zhou S, Liu B, Han Y, Wang Y, Chen L, Wu Z, Yang J, 2022. ZOVER: the database of zoonotic and vector-borne viruses. Nucleic Acids Res. 50(D1):D943-D949.


CONTACT

  The DRodVir database intends to integrate virological, ecological and epidemiological data to enhance our knowledge of rodents as the important reservoir hosts of many zoonotic viruses with significant impact on human and animal health. The information is manually collected from published literatures and records in GenBank database. However, the associated metadata of some sequences, such as the sampling time, location, rodent species, specimen type and etc, are missing currently. Therefore, we are grateful to the original authors to help us to complete or correct the related information collected in the database by sending feedback to Dr. Jian YANG.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This work is supported by the National Major Science and Technology Project, National of Key Research and Development Program, Program for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative Research Team in University of China and CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences. We would like to thank ViralZone for granting us to use the wonderful virion pictures.


Database last update: