A new phylodynamic model of Mycobacterium bovis transmission in a multi-host system uncovers the role of the unobserved reservoir
| Autor: | Stanley W. J. McDowell, David Wright, Robin A. Skuce, Hannah Trewby, Anthony O'Hare, Daniel Balaz, Rowland R. Kao, Carl McCormick |
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| Jazyk: | angličtina |
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
0301 basic medicine
Badger Epidemiology Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Pathology and Laboratory Medicine law.invention 0403 veterinary science Medical Conditions law Medicine and Health Sciences Biology (General) Phylogeny Animal Management Mammals Mycobacterium bovis education.field_of_study biology Ecology Eukaryota Agriculture 04 agricultural and veterinary sciences Ruminants 3. Good health Transmission (mechanics) Infectious Diseases Computational Theory and Mathematics Modeling and Simulation Genetic Epidemiology Vertebrates Livestock Pathogens Research Article Exploit Ecological Metrics 040301 veterinary sciences QH301-705.5 Ecology (disciplines) Population Infectious Disease Epidemiology 03 medical and health sciences Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being Bovines biology.animal Mustelidae Genetics Animals Computer Simulation education Molecular Biology Ecology Evolution Behavior and Systematics Disease Reservoirs business.industry Host (biology) Ecology and Environmental Sciences Organisms Biology and Life Sciences Species Diversity biology.organism_classification 030104 developmental biology Evolutionary biology Amniotes Cattle business Tuberculosis Bovine Zoology Badgers |
| Zdroj: | PLoS Computational Biology, Vol 17, Iss 6, p e1009005 (2021) O'Hare, A, Balaz, D, Wright, D M, McCormick, C, McDowell, S W J, Skuce, R & Kao, R 2021, ' A new phylodynamic model of Mycobacterium bovis transmission in a multi-host system uncovers the role of the unobserved reservoir ', PLoS Computational Biology . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009005 PLoS Computational Biology O’Hare, A, Balaz, D, Wright, D M, McCormick, C, McDowell, S, Trewby, H, Skuce, R A & Kao, R R 2021, ' A new phylodynamic model of Mycobacterium bovis transmission in a multi-host system uncovers the role of the unobserved reservoir ', PLoS Computational Biology, vol. 17, no. 6, e1009005 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009005 |
| ISSN: | 1553-7358 |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009005 |
| Popis: | Multi-host pathogens are particularly difficult to control, especially when at least one of the hosts acts as a hidden reservoir. Deep sequencing of densely sampled pathogens has the potential to transform this understanding, but requires analytical approaches that jointly consider epidemiological and genetic data to best address this problem. While there has been considerable success in analyses of single species systems, the hidden reservoir problem is relatively under-studied. A well-known exemplar of this problem is bovine Tuberculosis, a disease found in British and Irish cattle caused by Mycobacterium bovis, where the Eurasian badger has long been believed to act as a reservoir but remains of poorly quantified importance except in very specific locations. As a result, the effort that should be directed at controlling disease in badgers is unclear. Here, we analyse densely collected epidemiological and genetic data from a cattle population but do not explicitly consider any data from badgers. We use a simulation modelling approach to show that, in our system, a model that exploits available cattle demographic and herd-to-herd movement data, but only considers the ability of a hidden reservoir to generate pathogen diversity, can be used to choose between different epidemiological scenarios. In our analysis, a model where the reservoir does not generate any diversity but contributes to new infections at a local farm scale are significantly preferred over models which generate diversity and/or spread disease at broader spatial scales. While we cannot directly attribute the role of the reservoir to badgers based on this analysis alone, the result supports the hypothesis that under current cattle control regimes, infected cattle alone cannot sustain M. bovis circulation. Given the observed close phylogenetic relationship for the bacteria taken from cattle and badgers sampled near to each other, the most parsimonious hypothesis is that the reservoir is the infected badger population. More broadly, our approach demonstrates that carefully constructed bespoke models can exploit the combination of genetic and epidemiological data to overcome issues of extreme data bias, and uncover important general characteristics of transmission in multi-host pathogen systems. Author summary For single host pathogens, pathogen genetic data have been transformative for understanding the transmission and control of many diseases, particuarly rapidly evolving RNA viruses. However garnering similar insights where pathogens are multi-host is more challenging, particularly when the evolution of the pathogen is slower and pathogen sampling often heavily biased. This is the case for Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of bovine Tuberculosis (bTB) and for which the Eurasian badger plays an as yet poorly understood role in transmission and spread. Here we have developed a computational model that incorporates M. bovis genetic data from cattle only with a highly abstracted model of an unobserved reservoir. Our research shows that a model in which the reservoir does not contribute to pathogen diversity, but is a source of infection in spatially localised areas around each farm, better describes the patterns of outbreaks observed in a population-level sample of a single M. bovis genotype in Northern Ireland over a period of 15 years, compared to models in which either the reservoir has no role, disease spread is spatially extensive, or where they generate considerable diversity on their own. While this reservoir model is not explicitly a model of badgers, its characteristics are consistent with other data that would suggest a reservoir consisting of infected badgers that contribute substantially to cattle infection, but could not maintain disease on their own. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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