Abstract
In recent years, virus surveillance in filamentous fungi have revealed the existence of numerous novel viruses, which revolutionized our understanding of viral diversity on earth. In this study, we applied a novel virus discovery method to filamentous fungi, which has enhanced sensitivity and various advantages compared to conventional approaches. This enabled us to identify a large number of viruses that had been overlooked until now. In the present study, we discovered a divided RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp), which is an essential RNA viral replication enzyme and empirically considered to be encoded by a single gene. Due to such diversity of viral structure and untapped fungal resources, filamentous fungi currently are a promising model host organism for the research of RNA viruses.
