The distribution of pairwise genetic distances: a tool for investigating disease transmission.

ABSTRACT: Whole-genome sequencing of pathogens has recently been used to investigate disease outbreaks and is likely to play a growing role in real-time epidemiological studies. Methods to analyze high-resolution genomic data in this context are still lacking, and inferring transmission dynamics from such data typically requires many assumptions. While recent studies have proposed methods to infer who infected whom based on genetic distance between isolates from different individuals, the link between epidemiological relationship and genetic distance is still not well understood. In this study, we investigated the distribution of pairwise genetic distances between samples taken from infected hosts during an outbreak. We proposed an analytically tractable approximation to this distribution, which pro

SUBMITTER: Worby CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4256759 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature