Population-based sequencing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis reveals how current population dynamics are shaped by past epidemics

Population-based sequencing of Mycobacterium tuberculosis reveals how current population dynamics are shaped by past epidemics

Blog Article

Transmission is a driver of tuberculosis (TB) epidemics in high-burden regions, with assumed negligible impact in low-burden areas.However, we still lack a full characterization of transmission dynamics in settings with similar and different burdens.Genomic epidemiology can greatly help to quantify transmission, but the lack of whole genome sequencing population-based studies has hampered its application.Here, we generate a population-based dataset from Valencia region and compare it with available datasets from different TB-burden settings to reveal transmission dynamics heterogeneity and its public health implications.

We sequenced the whole genome of 785 Mycobacterium tuberculosis estes c6-5 engines bulk pack strains and linked genomes to patient epidemiological data.We use a pairwise distance clustering approach and phylodynamic methods to characterize transmission events over the last 150 years, in different TB-burden regions.Our results underscore significant differences in transmission between low-burden TB settings, i.e.

, clustering in Valencia region is higher (47.4%) than in Oxfordshire (27%), and similar to a high-burden area as Malawi (49.8%).By modeling times of the transmission links, we observed that settings with high transmission rate are associated with decades of uninterrupted transmission, irrespective of burden.

Together, our results reveal that 2334-080 burden and transmission are not necessarily linked due to the role of past epidemics in the ongoing TB incidence, and highlight the need for in-depth characterization of transmission dynamics and specifically tailored TB control strategies.