PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Manuel Jara
AU  - Alba Frias-De-Diego
AU  - Simon Dellicour
AU  - Guy Baele
AU  - Gustavo Machado
TI  - Global phylogeographical patterns in the spread of foot-and-mouth disease virus
AID  - 10.1101/590612
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 590612
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/28/590612.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/03/28/590612.full
AB  - The economic impacts of Foot-and-mouth disease virus (FMDV) have prompted most countries worldwide to embark on local, regional and national control and eradication programs. In conjunction with the global efforts to reduce further virus dissemination into free-zones and contain or eradicate circulation in endemic regions, global markets and animal trade have increased linearly in past decades facilitating virus spread to other countries. FMDV proved its potential to propagate across borders on numerous occasions, but yet details regarding how exactly the spread between countries occurred at global scale remain missing. To elucidate the FMDV global spread characteristics, we studied its spatiotemporal dynamics using Bayesian macroevolutionary analyses for serotypes O, A, Asia1, SAT1, SAT2, and SAT3, with a dataset that comprises 58 years of phylogenetic and epidemiological information. We reconstructed the evolutionary routes and historical spread of FMDV at global scale level. Our results highlight the main differences in phylogeographic patterns, dispersal rates, and the role of host species in the spread and maintenance of virus circulation. Contrary to previous studies, our results showed that four FMDV serotypes were monophyletic (O, A, Asia1 and C), while all SATs serotypes did not evidence a defined common ancestor. We also observed that FMDV diffusion was characterized by a great variability on the spatiotemporal dynamics exhibited by serotypes A and O, reflected by the wide variety of colonized countries. On the other hand, we observed that serotypes with local spread have been historically constrained into their endemic areas (Asia 1 and SATs), which in the case of SAT serotypes, may be related to a lower variety of hosts. This study provides significant insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of the global circulation of FMDV serotypes, by characterizing the viral routes of spread at serotype level, allowing to use the past knowledge to improve future decisions for a more efficient control and eradication of this disease.