Spatio-temporal analyses reveal infectious disease-driven selection in a free-ranging ungulate.

ABSTRACT: Infectious diseases play an important role in wildlife population dynamics by altering individual fitness, but detecting disease-driven natural selection in free-ranging populations is difficult due to complex disease-host relationships. Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a fatal infectious prion disease in cervids for which mutations in a single gene have been mechanistically linked to disease outcomes, providing a rare opportunity to study disease-driven selection in wildlife. In Wyoming, USA, CWD has gradually spread across mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus) populations, producing natural variation in disease history to evaluate selection pressure. We used spatial variation and a novel temporal comparison to investigate the relationship between CWD and a mutation at codon 225 of the m

SUBMITTER: LaCava MEF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8355672 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature