ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
Understanding the emergence of bacterial pathogens in novel hosts.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Occurrence of Mycoplasma gallisepticum in wild birds: A systematic review and meta-analysis.PloS one · 2020Pooled it
- Modular small RNA drives the emergence of virulence traits and environmental trade-offs in Vibrio cholerae.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Streptococcus suis avian expansion suggests shared antibiotic use drives host jumps.BMC biology · 2025Article
- A pathogen of good taste: genetics of a bacterial host jump of the plant pathogenMicrobial genomics · 2025Article
- Varying phylogenetic signal in susceptibility to four bacterial pathogens across species of Drosophilidae.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Anthropogenic activity and climate change exacerbate the spread of pathogenic bacteria in the environment.Science advances · 2025Article
- 'Re-Wilding' an Animal Model With Microbiota Shifts Immunity and Stress Gene Expression During Infection.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Evolution of the CRISPR-Cas9 defence system inMicrobial genomics · 2024Article
- Whole genome sequence and characterisation of Streptococcus suis 3112, isolated from snakeskin gourami, Trichopodus pectoralis.BMC genomics · 2024Article
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- Suspicions of two bridgehead invasions of Xylella fastidiosa subsp. multiplex in France.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Mutation rate dynamics reflect ecological change in an emerging zoonotic pathogen.PLoS genetics · 2021Article
- From Protein to Pandemic: The Transdisciplinary Approach Needed to Prevent Spillover and the Next Pandemic.Viruses · 2021Review
- Staphylococcus aureus in Agriculture: Lessons in Evolution from a Multispecies Pathogen.Clinical microbiology reviews · 2021Review
- Ecological and evolutionary drivers of haemoplasma infection and bacterial genotype sharing in a Neotropical bat community.Molecular ecology · 2020Article
- Host-shift as the cause of emerging infectious diseases: Experimental approaches using Drosophila-virus interactions.Genetics and molecular biology · 2020Article
- Dynamic and integrative approaches to understanding pathogen spillover.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
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3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary context of novel infections is largely based on viral diseases, even though bacterial pathogens may display key differences in the processes underlying their emergence. For instance, host-shift speciation, in which the jump of a pathogen into a novel host species is followed by the specialization on that host and the loss of infectivity of previous host(s), is commonly observed in viruses, but less often in bacteria. Here, we suggest that the extent to which pathogens evolve host generalism or specialism following a jump into a novel host will depend on their level of adaptation to dealing with different environments, their rates of molecular evolution and their ability to recombine. We then explore these hypotheses using a formal model and show that the high levels of phenotypic plasticity, low rates of evolution and the ability to recombine typical of bacterial pathogens should reduce their propensity to specialize on novel hosts. Novel bacterial infections may therefore be more likely to result in transient spillovers or increased host ranges than in host shifts. Finally, consistent with our predictions, we show that, in two unusual cases of contemporary bacterial host shifts, the bacterial pathogens both have small genomes and rapid rates of substitution. Further tests are required across a greater number of emerging pathogens to assess the validity of our hypotheses. This article is part of the theme issue 'Dynamic and integrative approaches to understanding pathogen spillover'.
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