Contact transmission of influenza virus between ferrets imposes a looser bottleneck than respiratory droplet transmission allowing propagation of antiviral resistance.

ABSTRACT: Influenza viruses cause annual seasonal epidemics and occasional pandemics. It is important to elucidate the stringency of bottlenecks during transmission to shed light on mechanisms that underlie the evolution and propagation of antigenic drift, host range switching or drug resistance. The virus spreads between people by different routes, including through the air in droplets and aerosols, and by direct contact. By housing ferrets under different conditions, it is possible to mimic various routes of transmission. Here, we inoculated donor animals with a mixture of two viruses whose genomes differed by one or two reverse engineered synonymous mutations, and measured the transmission of the mixture to exposed sentinel animals. Transmission through the air imposed a tight bottleneck since mo

SUBMITTER: Frise R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4949428 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature