Collaborative Research: Development and empirical tests of a mechanistic multi-host, multi-pathogen theory

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Most plants and animals can be infected by very small organisms that can make them sick. The infected plant or animal is called a "host" and the infecting organism is called a "pathogen". The interaction between hosts and pathogens is important to understand because it often determines one's health. Scientists are now becoming aware that the host-pathogen interaction is more complicated because one host can be infected by many pathogens, all of whom interact with each other as well as with the host. Likewise, one type of pathogen can infect several types of hosts, and how one host responds can influence whether another host becomes infected. Figuring out how all this plays out in Nature requires carefully designed experiments and mathematical models and this project provides both. Developing a deeper understanding of hosts and pathogens is critical because humans are dramatically altering the biological world, introducing new types of hosts and pathogens in some areas and removing them from others. Understanding how such gains and losses of organisms influences the spread of disease is important to the fields of conservation science and public health. This research program will train undergraduate, graduate, and high school students in the fields of disease ecology and mathematical biology, and will engage the public through a variety of outreach activities. Humans are impacting biodiversity patterns globally and these changes can influence the risk and prevalence of infectious diseases. The goal of this project is to develop a mechanistic multi-host multi-pathogen epidemiological theory that explains how between-host and between-pathogen competition jointly shape disease dynamics. To determine how competition alters the amplification or dilution of diseases, mathematical models will be developed and tested using planktonic species and their associated pathogens via laboratory based mesocosm and field experiments. This work will both extend current theory on multi-host and multi-pathogen communities as well as unify theory developed independently for diseases with different transmission modes. The theory-data pairing approach of this study is likely to generate important advances in epidemiological theory and disease ecology. This work will also yield insight into how future alterations to diversity will affect disease outbreaks in humans and wildlife.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.