Ugandan Bats Discovered as First Relatives of rubella virus.
At night in a Ugandan forest, a team of American
and African scientists take oral swabs from insect-eating cyclops leaf-nosed
bats.
In a necropsy room near the Baltic Sea, researchers try to determine
what killed a donkey, a Bennett's tree-kangaroo and a capybara at a German zoo
-; all of them suffering from severe brain swelling.
Neither team was aware of the other, yet they were both about to
converge on a discovery that would forever link them -; and help solve a
long-enduring mystery. They were each about to find two new relatives of the
rubella virus, which had been, since it was first identified in 1962, the only
known member of its virus family, Matonaviridae.
In Africa, this relative is ruhugu virus, named for the place where it
was found, Ruteete Subcounty, and the ...
