Publication details
Modelling invasive pathogen load from non-destructive sampling data
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Journal of Theoretical Biology |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.12.026 |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2018.12.026 |
| Keywords | Pathogen load; Skin lesion; Fungal infection; Pseudogymnoascus destructans; White-nose syndrome; Bat; UV light diagnostics |
| Description | Where microbes colonizing skin surface may help maintain organism homeostasis, those that invade living skin layers cause disease. In bats, white-nose syndrome is a fungal skin infection that affects animals during hibernation and may lead to mortality in severe cases. Here, we inferred the amount of fungus that had invaded skin tissue of diseased animals. We used simulations to estimate the unobserved disease severity in a non-lethal wing punch biopsy and to relate the simulated pathology to the measured fungal load in paired biopsies. We found that a single white-nose syndrome skin lesion packed with spores and hyphae of the causative agent, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, contains 48.93 pg of the pathogen DNA, which amounts to about 1560 P destructans genomes in one skin lesion. |