Ashley Sobel Leonard, Daniel Weissman, Benjamin Greenbaum, Elodie Ghedin, Katia Koelle
Journal of Virology
May 3, 2017
ABSTRACT
The bottleneck governing infectious disease transmission describes the size of the pathogen population transferred from donor to recipient host. Accurate quantification of the bottleneck size is particularly important for rapidly evolving pathogens such as influenza virus, as narrow bottlenecks reduce the amount of transferred viral genetic diversity and, thus, may slow the rate of viral adaptation. Previous studies have estimated bottleneck sizes governing viral transmission using statistical analyses of variants identified in pathogen sequencing data. These analyses, however, did not account for variant calling thresholds and stochastic viral replication dynamics within recipient hosts. Because these factors can skew bottleneck size estimates, we introduce a new method for inferring bottleneck sizes that accounts for these factors. Through the use of a simulated dataset, we first show that our method, based on beta-binomial sampling, accurately recovers transmission bottleneck sizes, whereas other methods fail to do so. We then apply our method to a dataset of influenza A infections for which viral deep-sequencing data from transmission pairs are available. We find that the IAV transmission bottleneck size estimates in this study are highly variable across transmission pairs, while the mean bottleneck size of 196 virions is consistent with the previous estimate for this dataset. Further, regression analysis shows a positive association between estimated bottleneck size and donor infection severity, as measured by temperature. These results support findings from experimental transmission studies showing that bottleneck sizes across transmission events can be variable and in part influenced by epidemiological factors.