Relating phylogenetic trees to transmission trees of infectious disease outbreaks.

ABSTRACT: Transmission events are the fundamental building blocks of the dynamics of any infectious disease. Much about the epidemiology of a disease can be learned when these individual transmission events are known or can be estimated. Such estimations are difficult and generally feasible only when detailed epidemiological data are available. The genealogy estimated from genetic sequences of sampled pathogens is another rich source of information on transmission history. Optimal inference of transmission events calls for the combination of genetic data and epidemiological data into one joint analysis. A key difficulty is that the transmission tree, which describes the transmission events between infected hosts, differs from the phylogenetic tree, which describes the ancestral relationships between

SUBMITTER: Ypma RJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3813836 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature