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Review
. 2018 Jul 28;11(10):1763-1778.
doi: 10.1111/eva.12678. eCollection 2018 Dec.

Pathogens in space: Advancing understanding of pathogen dynamics and disease ecology through landscape genetics

Christopher P Kozakiewicz  1 , Christopher P Burridge  1 , W Chris Funk  2 , Sue VandeWoude  3 , Meggan E Craft  4 , Kevin R Crooks  5 , Holly B Ernest  6 , Nicholas M Fountain-Jones  4 , Scott Carver  1
Affiliations
Review

Pathogens in space: Advancing understanding of pathogen dynamics and disease ecology through landscape genetics

Christopher P Kozakiewicz et al. Evol Appl. .

Abstract

Landscape genetics has provided many insights into how heterogeneous landscape features drive processes influencing spatial genetic variation in free-living organisms. This rapidly developing field has focused heavily on vertebrates, and expansion of this scope to the study of infectious diseases holds great potential for landscape geneticists and disease ecologists alike. The potential application of landscape genetics to infectious agents has garnered attention at formative stages in the development of landscape genetics, but systematic examination is lacking. We comprehensively review how landscape genetics is being used to better understand pathogen dynamics. We characterize the field and evaluate the types of questions addressed, approaches used and systems studied. We also review the now established landscape genetic methods and their realized and potential applications to disease ecology. Lastly, we identify emerging frontiers in the landscape genetic study of infectious agents, including recent phylogeographic approaches and frameworks for studying complex multihost and host-vector systems. Our review emphasizes the expanding utility of landscape genetic methods available for elucidating key pathogen dynamics (particularly transmission and spread) and also how landscape genetic studies of pathogens can provide insight into host population dynamics. Through this review, we convey how increasing awareness of the complementarity of landscape genetics and disease ecology among practitioners of each field promises to drive important cross-disciplinary advances.

Keywords: disease ecology; infectious disease; landscape epidemiology; landscape genetics; pathogen dynamics.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Papers using landscape genetic approaches for the study of infectious agents. (a) Number of publications per year that met our search criteria. (b) Number of publications using genetic data from each of the host, agent or vector species. (c) Number of publications studying pathogens by type, with genetic data source indicated for each type (“unspecified” typically involves studies of a hypothetical agent or estimates of overall pathogen exposure, such as inferred by immune‐linked loci). (d) Number of publications adopting each of our broadly identified conceptual approaches for applying landscape genetics to the study of pathogens/infectious agents—using host/vector genetics to predict agent spread, using host/vector genetics to explain agent spread/distribution and using pathogen genetics to directly study agent spread
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic indicating the increasing insights that may be gained from using approaches that are able to integrate additional host/vector and pathogen genetic datasets, starting with genetic data from a single host or vector, through to multispecies approaches that integrate multiple host, vector and pathogen datasets. LG: landscape genetic
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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