ArticleGenetics2011
Pervasive recombination and sympatric genome diversification driven by frequency-dependent selection in Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme disease bacterium.
Article in Genetics, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 46 papers.
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46 citing papers in PubMed, 76 citations in OpenAlex.
- Curiouser and curiouser: understanding the intersection of inter- and intra-specific diversity during theInfection and immunity · 2026Review
- The balance between intrinsic and ecological fitness reveals hidden regimes in eco-evolutionary population dynamics.Research square · 2025Article
- The balance between intrinsic and ecological fitness reveals hidden regimes in eco-evolutionary population dynamics.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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- Characterization and genomic analysis of the Lyme disease spirochete bacteriophage ϕBB-1.PLoS pathogens · 2024Article
- Characterization and genomic analysis of the Lyme disease spirochete bacteriophage ϕBB-1.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
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- Structural evolution of an immune evasion determinant shapes pathogen host tropism.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Novelty Search Promotes Antigenic Diversity in Microbial Pathogens.Pathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Evolution of theMicrobiology spectrum · 2022Article
- MHC class II genotype-by-pathogen genotype interaction for infection prevalence in a natural rodent-Borrelia system.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Cellular and immunological mechanisms influence host-adapted phenotypes in a vector-borne microparasite.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Maximum antigen diversification in a lyme bacterial population and evolutionary strategies to overcome pathogen diversity.The ISME journal · 2022Article
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- Host Specialisation, Immune Cross-Reaction and the Composition of Communities of Co-circulating Borrelia Strains.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary Genetics ofCurrent issues in molecular biology · 2021Review
- Lyme Disease in Humans.Current issues in molecular biology · 2021Article
- Evolutionary ecology of Lyme Borrelia.Infection, genetics and evolution : journal of molecular epidemiology and evolutionary genetics in infectious diseases · 2020Review
- Complement Evasion Contributes to Lyme Borreliae-Host Associations.Trends in parasitology · 2020Review
- Genotyping and Quantifying Lyme Pathogen Strains by Deep Sequencing of the Outer Surface Protein C (Journal of clinical microbiology · 2018Article
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 7 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
How genomic diversity within bacterial populations originates and is maintained in the presence of frequent recombination is a central problem in understanding bacterial evolution. Natural populations of Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterial agent of Lyme disease, consist of diverse genomic groups co-infecting single individual vertebrate hosts and tick vectors. To understand mechanisms of sympatric genome differentiation in B. burgdorferi, we sequenced and compared 23 genomes representing major genomic groups in North America and Europe. Linkage analysis of >13,500 single-nucleotide polymorphisms revealed pervasive horizontal DNA exchanges. Although three times more frequent than point mutation, recombination is localized and weakly affects genome-wide linkage disequilibrium. We show by computer simulations that, while enhancing population fitness, recombination constrains neutral and adaptive divergence among sympatric genomes through periodic selective sweeps. In contrast, simulations of frequency-dependent selection with recombination produced the observed pattern of a large number of sympatric genomic groups associated with major sequence variations at the selected locus. We conclude that negative frequency-dependent selection targeting a small number of surface-antigen loci (ospC in particular) sufficiently explains the maintenance of sympatric genome diversity in B. burgdorferi without adaptive divergence. We suggest that pervasive recombination makes it less likely for local B. burgdorferi genomic groups to achieve host specialization. B. burgdorferi genomic groups in the northeastern United States are thus best viewed as constituting a single bacterial species, whose generalist nature is a key to its rapid spread and human virulence.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.