Genomic surveillance elucidates Ebola virus origin and transmission during the 2014 outbreak
By Stephen Gire, A. Goba, Kristian G. Andersen, Rachel S. G. Sealfon, Daniel J. Park, L. Kanneh, S. Jalloh, M. Momoh, Mohamed Fullah, G. Dudas and 48 more. Science, 2014
1,217 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Evolution of Ebola virus over time The high rate of mortality in the current Ebola epidemic has made it difficult for researchers to collect samples of the virus and study its evolution. Gire et al. describe Ebola epidemiology on the basis of 99 whole-genome sequences, including samples from 78 affected individuals. The authors analyzed changes in the viral sequence and conclude that the current outbreak probably resulted from the spread of the virus from central Africa in the past decade. The outbreak started from a single transmission event from an unknown animal reservoir into the human population. Two viral lineages from Guinea then spread from person to person into Sierra Leone. Science, this issue p. 1369 Sequencing the genome of Ebola virus disease provides tracking information. In its largest outbreak, Ebola virus disease is spreading through Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria. We sequenced 99 Ebola virus genomes from 78 patients in Sierra Leone to ~2000× coverage. We observed a rapid accumulation of interhost and intrahost genetic variation, allowing us to characterize patterns of viral transmission over the initial weeks of the epidemic. This West African variant likely diverged from central African lineages around 2004, crossed from Guinea to Sierra Leone in May 2014, and has exhibited sustained human-to-human transmission subsequently, with no evidence of additional zoonotic sources. Because many of the mutations alter protein sequences and other biologically meaningful targets, they should be monitored for impact on diagnostics, vaccines, and therapies critical to outbreak response.
Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/034891e23a005557cd540e4d55fbcde868fba398
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Citations in the corpus
- Data Based Identification and Prediction of Nonlinear and Complex Dynamical Systems (2016, background): “Recently, in order to locate the source of the outbreak of Ebola virus in Africa, five medical practitioners lost their lives [414].”
- NCBI Viral Genomes Resource (2014, background): “Recent outbreaks of Ebolavirus (1,2) and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) (3,4) clearly demonstrate the power of sequence analysis in viral surveillance, host reservoir identification and public health policy debate.”
- The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2015 update (2014, background): “In response to a request for help from vaccine researchers, in September 2014 we fast-tracked an Ebola genome browser (26) showing all available viral sequences from previous outbreaks and the recently published 99 genome sequences from the 2014 outbreak (27).”
- The UCSC Genome Browser database: 2017 update (2016, background): “One highlight in this category is the addition of a super-track showing the genomic mapping of biomedical sequences submitted as part of patent application documents worldwide, obtained from the Cambia Lens PatSeq database (24) and aligned to the human (hg19), mouse (mm10) and Ebola virus (eboVir3) ”
- Towards a genomics-informed, real-time, global pathogen surveillance system (2017, background): “Real-time analyses published around the peak of the epidemic suggested the following: the outbreak probably arose from a single introduction into humans and not repeated zoonotic introductions 49, 50 ; sexual transmission had a previously unrecognized role in maintaining transmission chains 51 ; and”
- Modeling infectious disease dynamics in the complex landscape of global health (2015, positive): “Quantitative phylogenetic tools applied to samples from initial victims provided important estimates of the origin of the outbreak (15).”
- Real-time, portable genome sequencing for Ebola surveillance (2016, background): “(1)Institute of Microbiology and Infection, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK (2)The European Mobile Laboratory Consortium, Bernhard-NochtInstitute for Tropical Medicine, D-20359 Hamburg, Germany (3)Bernhard-NochtInstitute for Tropical Medicine, D-20359 Hamburg, Germany (4)National I”