Two boundaries separate Borrelia burgdorferi populations in North America.

ABSTRACT: Understanding the spread of infectious diseases is crucial for implementing effective control measures. For this, it is important to obtain information on the contemporary population structure of a disease agent and to infer the evolutionary processes that may have shaped it. Here, we investigate on a continental scale the population structure of Borrelia burgdorferi, the causative agent of Lyme borreliosis (LB), a tick-borne disease, in North America. We test the hypothesis that the observed population structure is congruent with recent population expansions and that these were preceded by bottlenecks mostly likely caused by the near extirpation in the 1900s of hosts required for sustaining tick populations. Multilocus sequence typing and complementary population analytical tools were use

SUBMITTER: Margos G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3416618 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature