Family: Kolmioviridae

Genus: Perideltavirus

Distinguishing features

Perideltaviruses include Bat deltavirus (DesRot/Peru/AYA14_DrDV-A), Marmota monax deltavirus, and Odocoileus virginianus deltavirus (Bergner et al., 2021, Iwamoto et al., 2021). Perideltaviruses infect bats, sciurids, and cervids (Bergner et al., 2021, Iwamoto et al., 2021).

Virion

Virions are unknown.

Nucleic acid

Perideltaviruses have non-segmented, negative-sense, covalently-closed circular RNA (cccRNA) genomes of about 1.7 kb with 53.4-56.4% GC content (Iwamoto et al., 2021).

Proteins

Perideltaviruses are predicted to express delta antigen (DAg)-like protein (Bergner et al., 2021, Iwamoto et al., 2021).

Biology

Bat deltavirus (DesRot/Peru/AYA14_DrDV-A), Marmota monax deltavirus, and Odocoileus virginianus deltavirus were respectively discovered in common vampire bats (phyllostomid Desmodus rotundus (Geoffroy, 1810)) sampled in Peru, groundhogs (sciurid Marmota monax (Linnaeus, 1758), and white tailed deer (cervid Odocoileus virginianus (Zimmermann, 1780)) (Bergner et al., 2021, Iwamoto et al., 2021).

Species demarcation criteria

The genus currently includes three species. Members of the same species have a minimum of 80 % nt genome and 70 % S-DAg aa identity and form a monophyletic cluster in phylogenetic analyses.