Ecological drivers of virus adaptation
Climate change is having major effects on patterns of pathogen prevalence globally, but traditional disease ecological models are limited in scope for understanding these effects across time, pathogen and host diversity, and ecological conditions.
We developed a framework to test this using adaptation in host genomes as a proxy for pathogen exposure. Using a novel application of a Bayesian statistical mediation model, we found that decrease in precipitation seasonality is a major driver of greater virus adaptation across terrestrial mammals (Lauterbur and Enard, in prep). |
Future work in the lab is delving further into these relationships using bats as a useful study system. Bats have a unique relationship with infectious disease, are highly diverse, and survive across a wide variety of habitats, making them an ideal study system. The lab is part of the Bat1K consortium and active in multiple Bat1K and GBatNet working groups.
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