{"title":"Virulence Evolution: Thinking Outside of the Host","authors":"Luís M. Silva, Jacob C. Koella","doi":"10.1111/eva.70136","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>The main theory of the evolution of virulence relies on a trade-off between virulence and transmission rate. However, it has been difficult to measure the required trade-off. A recent transmission decomposition framework explains that this might be partly due to a lack of information about the parasite's survival in the environment outside its hosts, where the parasite finds itself during transmission to its next host. In this study, we used parasite lines of the microsporidian <i>Vavraia culicis</i> with varying levels of virulence upon infecting their host, the mosquito <i>Anopheles gambiae</i>, to explore the interaction between parasite-driven virulence within its host and its survival outside of the host. The parasite lines with greater virulence and growth within their hosts had a cost in their intrinsic ability to withstand the environment, irrespective of temperature. These results underscore the importance of considering the full context of transmission and other parasite fitness traits in studying and predicting the evolution and spread of infectious diseases.</p>","PeriodicalId":168,"journal":{"name":"Evolutionary Applications","volume":"18 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":3.2000,"publicationDate":"2025-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/eva.70136","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Evolutionary Applications","FirstCategoryId":"99","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eva.70136","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The main theory of the evolution of virulence relies on a trade-off between virulence and transmission rate. However, it has been difficult to measure the required trade-off. A recent transmission decomposition framework explains that this might be partly due to a lack of information about the parasite's survival in the environment outside its hosts, where the parasite finds itself during transmission to its next host. In this study, we used parasite lines of the microsporidian Vavraia culicis with varying levels of virulence upon infecting their host, the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, to explore the interaction between parasite-driven virulence within its host and its survival outside of the host. The parasite lines with greater virulence and growth within their hosts had a cost in their intrinsic ability to withstand the environment, irrespective of temperature. These results underscore the importance of considering the full context of transmission and other parasite fitness traits in studying and predicting the evolution and spread of infectious diseases.
期刊介绍：
Evolutionary Applications is a fully peer reviewed open access journal. It publishes papers that utilize concepts from evolutionary biology to address biological questions of health, social and economic relevance. Papers are expected to employ evolutionary concepts or methods to make contributions to areas such as (but not limited to): medicine, agriculture, forestry, exploitation and management (fisheries and wildlife), aquaculture, conservation biology, environmental sciences (including climate change and invasion biology), microbiology, and toxicology. All taxonomic groups are covered from microbes, fungi, plants and animals. In order to better serve the community, we also now strongly encourage submissions of papers making use of modern molecular and genetic methods (population and functional genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, epigenetics, quantitative genetics, association and linkage mapping) to address important questions in any of these disciplines and in an applied evolutionary framework. Theoretical, empirical, synthesis or perspective papers are welcome.
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