bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.02.16.431403; this version posted February 16, 2021. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. Imrie et al. Virus relatedness predicts host susceptibility. 1 1 Virus relatedness predicts susceptibility in novel host species 2 3 Ryan M. Imrie*, Katherine E. Roberts, Ben Longdon 4 5 Centre for Ecology & Conservation, Biosciences, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, 6 University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, Penryn, Cornwall 7 *corresponding author:
[email protected] 8 9 10 11 Abstract 12 As a major source of outbreaks and emerging infectious diseases, virus host shifts cause significant 13 health, social and economic damage. Predicting the outcome of infection with novel combinations of 14 virus and host remains a key challenge in virus research. Host evolutionary relatedness can explain 15 variation in transmission rates, virulence, and virus community composition between host species, 16 but there is much to learn about the potential for virus evolutionary relatedness to explain variation 17 in the ability of viruses to infect novel hosts. Here, we measure correlations in the outcomes of 18 infection across 45 Drosophilidae host species with four Cripavirus isolates that vary in their 19 evolutionary relatedness. We found positive correlations between every pair of viruses tested, with 20 the strength of correlation tending to decrease with greater evolutionary distance between viruses. 21 These results suggest that virus evolutionary relatedness can explain variation in the outcome of 22 host shifts and may be a useful proxy for determining the likelihood of novel virus emergence.