Distinguishing whether pathogens are novel or endemic is critical for controlling emerging infectious diseases, an increasing threat to wildlife and human health. To test the endemic vs. novel pathogen hypothesis, we present a unique analysis of intraspecific host-pathogen phylogenetic concordance of tiger salamanders and an emerging Ranavirus throughout Western North America. There is significant non-concordance of host and virus gene trees, suggesting pathogen novelty. However, non-concordance has likely resulted from virus introductions by human movement of infected salamanders. When human-associated viral introductions are excluded, host and virus gene trees are identical, strongly supporting coevolution and endemism. A laboratory experiment showed an introduced virus strain is significantly more virulent than endemic strains, likely due to artificial selection for high virulence. Thus, our analysis of intraspecific phylogenetic concordance revealed that human introduction of viruses is the mechanism underlying tree non-concordance and possibly disease emergence via artificial selection.
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Virus Evol
November 2024
Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada.
Hypermutated proviruses, which arise in a single Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) replication cycle when host antiviral APOBEC3 proteins introduce extensive guanine to adenine mutations throughout the viral genome, persist in all people living with HIV receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART). However, hypermutated sequences are routinely excluded from phylogenetic trees because their extensive mutations complicate phylogenetic inference, and as a result, we know relatively little about their within-host evolutionary origins and dynamics. Using >1400 longitudinal single-genome-amplified HIV sequences isolated from six women over a median of 18 years of follow-up-including plasma HIV RNA sequences collected over a median of 9 years between seroconversion and ART initiation, and >500 proviruses isolated over a median of 9 years on ART-we evaluated three approaches for masking hypermutation in nucleotide alignments.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMol Phylogenet Evol
January 2025
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and University of Michigan Herbarium, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA.
Lorchels, also known as false morels (Gyromitra sensu lato), are iconic due to their brain-shaped mushrooms and production of gyromitrin, a deadly mycotoxin. Molecular phylogenetic studies have hitherto failed to resolve deep-branching relationships in the lorchel family, Discinaceae, hampering our ability to settle longstanding taxonomic debates and to reconstruct the evolution of toxin production. We generated 75 draft genomes from cultures and ascomata (some collected as early as 1960), conducted phylogenomic analyses using 1542 single-copy orthologs to infer the early evolutionary history of lorchels, and identified genomic signatures of trophic mode and mating-type loci to better understand lorchel ecology and reproductive biology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPediatr Pulmonol
January 2025
Stead Family Department of Pediatrics, University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Iowa City, Iowa, USA.
Background: People with cystic fibrosis (CF) may not expectorate sputum at young ages or after they receive CFTR modulators. While oropharyngeal swabs are commonly used to test for lower airway pathogens, it is unknown whether Staphylococcus aureus from the oropharynx matches the strain(s) infecting the lungs. Our goal was to determine whether oropharyngeal and sputum isolates of S.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSyst Biol
January 2025
Cornell University, Department of Entomology, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
While some relationships in phylogenomic studies have remained stable since the Sanger sequencing era, many challenging nodes remain, even with genome-scale data. Incongruence or lack of resolution in the phylogenomic era is frequently attributed to inadequate data modeling and analytical issues that lead to systematic biases. However, few studies investigate the potential for random error or establish expectations for the level of resolution achievable with a given empirical dataset and integrate uncertainties across methods when faced with conflicting results.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS One
January 2025
Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Epithelial cancers are typically heterogeneous with primary prostate cancer being a typical example of histological and genomic variation. Prior studies of primary prostate cancer tumour genetics revealed extensive inter and intra-patient genomic tumour heterogeneity. Recent advances in machine learning have enabled the inference of ground-truth genomic single-nucleotide and copy number variant status from transcript data.
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