Leishmania spp. are important pathogens causing a vector-borne disease with a broad range of clinical manifestations from self-healing ulcers to the life-threatening visceral forms. Presence of Leishmania RNA virus (LRV) confers survival advantage to these parasites by suppressing anti-leishmanial immunity in the vertebrate host. The two viral species, LRV1 and LRV2 infect species of the subgenera Viannia and Leishmania, respectively. In this work we investigated co-phylogenetic patterns of leishmaniae and their viruses on a small scale (LRV2 in L. major) and demonstrated their predominant coevolution, occasionally broken by intraspecific host switches. Our analysis of the two viral genes, encoding the capsid and RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP), revealed them to be under the pressure of purifying selection, which was considerably stronger for the former gene across the whole tree. The selective pressure also differs between the LRV clades and correlates with the frequency of interspecific host switches. In addition, using experimental (capsid) and predicted (RDRP) models we demonstrated that the evolutionary variability across the structure is strikingly different in these two viral proteins.

Central European Institute of Technology Masaryk University 60177 Brno Czech Republic

Faculty of Bioengineering and Bioinformatics Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991 Moscow Russia

Faculty of Biology M 5 Lomonosov Moscow State University 119991 Moscow Russia

Institute for Information Transmission Problems Russian Academy of Sciences 127051 Moscow Russia

Life Science Research Centre Faculty of Science University of Ostrava 71000 Ostrava Czech Republic

Martsinovsky Institute of Medical Parasitology Sechenov University 119435 Moscow Russia

Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences 199034 St Petersburg Russia

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