Subtype diversity and reassortment potential for co-circulating avian influenza viruses at a diversity hot spot.

ABSTRACT: Biological diversity has long been used to measure ecological health. While evidence exists from many ecosystems that declines in host biodiversity may lead to greater risk of disease emergence, the role of pathogen diversity in the emergence process remains poorly understood. Particularly, because a more diverse pool of pathogen types provides more ways in which evolutionary innovations may arise, we suggest that host-pathogen systems with high pathogen diversity are more prone to disease emergence than systems with relatively homogeneous pathogen communities. We call this prediction the diversity-emergence hypothesis. To show how this hypothesis could be tested, we studied a system comprised of North American shorebirds and their associated low-pathogenicity avian influenza (LPAI) viruse

SUBMITTER: Barton HD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4000580 | biostudies-literature | 2014 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature