Natural hosts of different hantavirus genotypes in south America: who is who?

Accurate species identification of the genus Oligoryzomys is particularly important because several species act as natural hosts of hantaviruses affecting humans. We used molecular phylogenetic and a phylogeographic approaches to assign the specific status to individuals from a wide geographical area of Central and South America. We summarize here the rodent-hantavirus relationship emerging from our results and from those available in the literature.