Using host pathogen genetics to determine population connectivity.

Funding Sources: USGS Wildlife: Terrestrial and Endangered Resources Program.

Collaborators: Mary Poss (Penn State) and Steven Kalinowski (Montana State University).

One of the primary issues for CWD, and wildlife disease in general, is to predict where and how fast it will spread at a broad spatial scale. To address this issue, my collaborators and I are pioneering new analytical and laboratory methods to use viruses to track host movements. The short generation times and high mutation rates of viruses yield higher spatial and temporal resolution than host genetics, while the ongoing CWD testing in many states allows us to look at connectivity at an unprecedented scale. This work has the potential to be widely applicable and we are developing new laboratory and analytical techniques. First, we have developed meta-genomic approaches to finding new viruses using shotgun sequencing of lymph nodes. To do so, we had to improve software and our lab techniques for isolating non-host DNA and RNA. This approach allows researchers to identify new pathogens without prior information on what to look for. In addition to identifying pathogens, this project will be useful in many other conservation contexts where researchers are interested in anthropogenic changes to host connectivity that may be too recent to detect with host genetics.


Citations:
Wittekindt, NE, A Padhi, SC Schuster, J Qi, F Zhao, L Tomsho, L Kasson, M Packard, P Cross, & M Poss. 2010. Nodeomics: Pathogen Detection in Vertebrate Lymph Nodes Using Meta-Transcriptomics. PLoS ONE 5(10): e13432. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0013432.



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