Journal article

Non-random patterns in viral diversity

SJ Anthony, A Islam, C Johnson, I Navarrete-Macias, E Liang, K Jain, PL Hitchens, X Che, A Soloyvov, AL Hicks, R Ojeda-Flores, C Zambrana-Torrelio, W Ulrich, MK Rostal, A Petrosov, J Garcia, N Haider, N Wolfe, T Goldstein, SS Morse Show all

Nature Communications | NATURE PORTFOLIO | Published : 2015

Open access

Abstract

It is currently unclear whether changes in viral communities will ever be predictable. Here we investigate whether viral communities in wildlife are inherently structured (inferring predictability) by looking at whether communities are assembled through deterministic (often predictable) or stochastic (not predictable) processes. We sample macaque faeces across nine sites in Bangladesh and use consensus PCR and sequencing to discover 184 viruses from 14 viral families. We then use network modelling and statistical null-hypothesis testing to show the presence of non-random deterministic patterns at different scales, between sites and within individuals. We show that the effects of determinism ..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases


Funding Acknowledgements

This study was made possible by the support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project (cooperative agreement number GHN-A-OO-09-00010-00). We thank the Bangladesh Forest Department and the Ministry of Environment and Forest for permission to conduct this study. We are thankful to icddr, b and its core donor the Governments of Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Sweden and the UK for providing core/unrestricted support to icddr,b. We thank Jens H Kuhn, Bohyun Lee, Angelica de Almeida Campos, Kawthar Muhammad, Oscar Rico, Amy Wray, Nicole Arrigo, Emily. S. Gurley, Ausraful Islam, Tapan Kumar Dey, Shafiqul Islam, Abdul Hai, Pitu Biswas and Gafur Sheikh for their contributions to this study.