Nature-paper beschrijft genetische evolutie ebolavirus
ArrayHet vakblad Nature publiceert deze week een bijzondere studie over de genetische evolutie van het ebolavirus tijdens de uitbraak in West-Afrika. De door Public Health England gevoerde studie kwam mede tot stand dankzij de stalen die Saïd Abdellati en Tine Vermoesen van het Instituut voor Tropische Geneeskunde in Guinee analyseerden. Saïd en Tine bemanden in oktober en november 2014 het European Mobile Lab (EMLab) in Guéckédou (Guinee) toen de epidemie een hevige piek kende. Samen analyseerden ze 651 stalen, waarvan er 277 (43%) ebola-positief testten.
Saïd en Tine zijn, net als enkele collega’s van UAntwerpen en KU Leuven, co-auteurs van de paper in Nature. Door een groot aantal stalen te bestuderen konden de onderzoekers zien hoe verschillende viruslijnen zich vanuit Guinee hebben verspreid. Met deze informatie kan men onder andere bepalen hoe de maatregelen om de ziekte in te perken hebben gewerkt (zie persbericht onder).
Ebola: Understanding the origins of the recent Ebola outbreak
DOI: 10.1038/nature14594
New insights into the genetic evolution of the ongoing Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa are reported in Nature this week. The analysis shows how different lineages of the virus evolved and spread in West Africa, between Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
The current Ebola virus outbreak has been traced back to transmission from a bat to an infant in Guinea in December 2013, from which it spread throughout Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The origin of the particular virus in each country and the time of transmission have been unclear, but the new information presented by Miles Carroll and colleagues helps to address these questions. They analyse 179 new virus sequences from patient samples collected in Guinea between March 2014 and January 2015. The study pinpoints the origins of the virus in each affected country and narrows down the timing at which each particular virus was transmitted; for example, they find that the Ebola virus from Guinea probably spilled over into Sierra Leone in April or early May 2014.
To date there have been over 27,000 reported cases and over 11,000 deaths attributed to the ongoing Ebola virus outbreak. Data from this new analysis could be used to assess how effective control measures have been and helps us to understand how the current outbreak has been evolving.
‘Temporal and spatial analysis of the 2014–2015 Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa ‘: (the URL will go live after the embargo ends): http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/
