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A Review of “Phylogenetic concordance analysis shows an emerging pathogen is novel and endemic.”

The article is a report on an experiment that describes whether pathogens are novel or endemic in controlling infectious diseases. To illustrate this scientists’ experiment on tiger salamanders and the emerging Ranavirus in Western North America. They sample sites in Canada and the US where there have been salamander die-offs. The scientists then isolate viruses in pure culture from the animals that were diseased at every site and took the salamander tissue for genetic analysis. The scientists conduct different experiments on the salamander tissues; concordance testing, and the infection experiment. Ultimately, use uninfected mice as the control group of the experiment. Ultimately, the scientists identified that pathogens are highly novel and endemic in controlling emerging infectious diseases.

An understanding of the coevolutionary relationships between the viruses and salamanders is quite important. Pathogens and hosts provide environments that are ever-changing for one another, and this creates dynamic patterns of reciprocal selection that helps in driving the coevolutionary process. Apart from human beings and species that are economically important, little is known about how diseases and infections affect populations of wildlife, but with emerging infectious diseases that affect both humans and wildlife, a comprehension of the evolutionary dynamics of wildlife diseases is becoming significant.

This study is essential since it details how pathogens are endemic and novel for the emergence of diseases among the populations of tiger salamanders in western North America. The study shows that ranaviruses are more endemic in the tiger salamanders and the bait salamanders that are infected are moved by human beings thus result in perceptible host-switches. Pathogen and host trees are non-concordant and very different, thus proving pathogen novelty. The next experiment that the scientists could undertake should involve if host defenses that are evolved can be used to treat different host populations.