Remotely sensed correlates of phylogeny: tick-borne flaviviruses

Vector-borne pathogen systems are limited by climate, principally through its impact on the distribution, abundance and population dynamics of the vectors and on the interaction of vectors with their hosts. This leads to the prediction that climate has been a significant factor in the evolution of these pathogens and, by implication, will be important in future events on both evolutionary and ecological time-scales. New phylogenetic trees of organisms, that describe their evolutionary history, are routinely available, but explanations for the driving force and constraints that have shaped the evolutionary origin of new pathogen strains are rare. Under the force of environmental pressures that change in space and time, which pathogens are likely to emerge in new places and where will this be? To answer such questions, data from molecular biology can be linked with data from satellites that allow us to characterize environmental conditions on a global scale. Broad-scale patterns in the satellite imagery are consistent with the pattern of new tick-borne flaviviruses having evolved sequentially in a cline across the world. So far, the distribution of three tick-borne flaviviruses from western Europe have been captured simultaneously by the same 10 satellite-derived seasonal climatic variables. Once this procedure is extended to the remaining viruses in this clade, we shall test for significant matches between their phylogenetic tree and an independent tree derived from quantitative descriptions of the viruses' 'eco-space'. This will indicate the extent of key ecological drivers for specific evolutionary events, whose biological basis can then be explored in detail.