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Biological and biomedical implications of the co-evolution of pathogens and their hosts

Abstract

Co-evolution between host and pathogen is, in principle, a powerful determinant of the biology and genetics of infection and disease. Yet co-evolution has proven difficult to demonstrate rigorously in practice, and co-evolutionary thinking is only just beginning to inform medical or veterinary research in any meaningful way, even though it can have a major influence on how genetic variation in biomedically important traits is interpreted. Improving our understanding of the biomedical significance of co-evolution will require changing the way in which we look for it, complementing the phenomenological approach traditionally favored by evolutionary biologists with the exploitation of the extensive data becoming available on the molecular biology and molecular genetics of host–pathogen interactions.

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Figure 1: Schematic representation of co-evolution, emphasizing reciprocity in that changes in allele frequencies due to selection in one species impose selection resulting in changes in allele frequencies in the other.
Figure 2: Allele frequency changes driven by co-evolution.
Figure 3: Evidence for co-evolution.
Figure 4: Illustration of co-evolution between two host populations (blue rectangles) and four pathogen populations (red circles).

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. Read, L. Taylor, D. Haydon, M. Charleston, R. Phillips, C. Davies, P. Goulder, C. Lively and E. Baranowski for comments and discussion and gratefully acknowledge support from the Wellcome Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Royal Society, Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia and Fundacion R Areces.

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Woolhouse, M., Webster, J., Domingo, E. et al. Biological and biomedical implications of the co-evolution of pathogens and their hosts. Nat Genet 32, 569–577 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/ng1202-569

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