MD Hall, G Bento and D Ebert. 2017. The evolutionary consequences of stepwise infection processes. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, in press.
At least four years ago I starting working on this while in the lab of Dieter Ebert. A move back home, staring a lab from scratch, and some life distractions, pushed out working on the final draft for a long time. Every since my honours, TREE has been one of my favourite journals and having a paper published there was a goal of mine. Now it is out. Motivated by much of the work done in Dieters lab by the likes of Frida Ben-ami, David Duneau, and Pepijn Luijckx, this review explores how the organisation of the infection process itself may modify the evolution of disease.
Four papers were really a motivating factor. Each touching on a different field or topic that either partitions some metric of fitness into discrete episodes or then follows the consequences of this type of variation for adaptation.
- D. Duneau, et al. 2011. Resolving the infection process reveals striking differences in the contribution of environment, genetics and phylogeny to host–parasite interactions. BMC Biol., 9, p. 11
- S.A. Frank. 2004. Genetic variation in cancer predisposition: mutational decay of a robust genetic control network Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A., 101, pp. 8061–8065.
- N.E. Martins, et al. 2013. Host adaptation is contingent upon the infection route taken by pathogens. PLoS Pathog., 9, p. e1003601
- J. Hunt, et al. 2009. Male–male competition, female mate choice and their interaction: determining total sexual selection. J. Evol. Biol., 22, pp. 13–26
Some aspects got cut. Originally there was much more on modularity and pleiotropy and the consequences this has for disease. The title was once: Modularity, hierarchy and heresy: the evolutionary consequences of a step wise infection process. The issue of pleiotropy underlying the defence cascade is one I am keenly interested in and will follow up at some point.
The stepwise infection model at the individual level of the host and its consequences for patterns of variation at the population level.