KU Leuven, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Transplantation, Rega Institute for Medical Research, Division of Clinical and Epidemiological Virology, Leuven, Belgium.
Research and Development Institute, National Infection Service, Public Health England, Porton Down, Wiltshire, United Kingdom.
PLoS Negl Trop Dis. 2020 Mar 4;14(3):e0008117. doi: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0008117. eCollection 2020 Mar.
Ebolaviruses pose a substantial threat to wildlife populations and to public health in Africa. Evolutionary analyses of virus genome sequences can contribute significantly to elucidate the origin of new outbreaks, which can help guide surveillance efforts. The reconstructed between-outbreak evolutionary history of Zaire ebolavirus so far has been highly consistent. By removing the confounding impact of population growth bursts during local outbreaks on the free mixing assumption that underlies coalescent-based demographic reconstructions, we find-contrary to what previous results indicated-that the circulation dynamics of Ebola virus in its animal reservoir are highly uncertain. Our findings also accentuate the need for a more fine-grained picture of the Ebola virus diversity in its reservoir to reliably infer the reservoir origin of outbreak lineages. In addition, the recent appearance of slower-evolving variants is in line with latency as a survival mechanism and with bats as the natural reservoir host.
埃博拉病毒对非洲的野生动物种群和公共卫生构成了重大威胁。对病毒基因组序列的进化分析可以极大地阐明新疫情的起源，从而有助于指导监测工作。目前，对扎伊尔埃博拉病毒的疫情间进化史的重建一直高度一致。通过消除在地方疫情中人口增长爆发对基于合并的人口重建所依据的自由混合假设的混淆影响，我们发现——与之前的结果所表明的相反——埃博拉病毒在其动物宿主中的循环动态极不确定。我们的研究结果还强调了需要更精细地了解其在动物宿主中的埃博拉病毒多样性，以可靠推断疫情谱系的宿主起源。此外，最近出现的进化较慢的变种与潜伏期作为一种生存机制以及蝙蝠作为其自然宿主相符。
