Graduate Research Assistant Auburn University Auburn, Alabama
The dynamics and determinants of virulence evolution in plant pathogen populations, particularly those transmitted by vectors, are complex and unresolved. This study employs evolutionary simulations in the SLiM 4 modeling framework to investigate how virulence evolves in vector-transmitted pathogens in an attempt to understand the factors influencing this process. It is a pleiotropic model in which genes that control for virulence also affect fitness in the vector; which draws its inspiration from the biology of the plant-pathogenic bacteria, Xylella fastidiosa, transmission system. We examined how evolutionary dynamics and trajectories were affected by variation in migration rates, the extent of virulence, and the strength of pleiotropy. We found that each was important, but the most important was the maximum virulence effect.
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