Virological factors that increase the transmissibility of emerging human viruses
Open accessAbstract
Significance: With changes in land use and increased urbanization, the frequency with which pathogens jump species barriers to emerge in new hosts is expected to rise. Knowing which viruses may be more likely to become transmissible among humans, as opposed to only generating dead-end spillover infections, would be of considerable benefit to pandemic planning. Using multivariate modeling and multimodel inference, we sought to both identify and quantify those biological features of viruses that best determine interhuman transmissibility. This analysis revealed that chronic, nonsegmented, non–vector-borne, nonenveloped viruses with low host mortality had the highest likelihood of being transmissible among humans whereas genomic features had little predictive power. Our analysis therefore reveals that multiple virological features determine the likelihood of successful emergence.
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Cross-species transmission results from a complex interplay between pathogen characteristics, the original host's infection, behavior, and ecology, pathogen shedding and survival in the environment, human exposure, and human susceptibility.
“Cross-species transmission results from a complex interplay between the characteristics of the pathogen (2, 10–12): the original host’s infection, behavior, and ecology; how the pathogen is shed into and survives in the environment; how humans are exposed to the pathogen; and how susceptible those humans are to infection (4, 12–16).”
From Impacts of biodiversity and biodiversity loss on zoonotic diseases (2021) · cites this paper as [2]
The Significance and Discussion sections identify viral traits associated with human-to-human transmission and acknowledge ecological factors and barriers to host adaptation. They do not establish the claimed interplay involving the original host’s behavior, environmental shedding and survival, human exposure, and human susceptibility; the paper’s main analysis concerns onward transmission after spillover. (LLM, conf=0.85)
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- Authors
- Geoghegan, J. L., Senior, A. M., Di Giallonardo, F., & Holmes, E. C.
- Affiliations
- The University of Sydney (AU)
- Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia;
- Corresponding author
- Holmes, Edward C.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2016-03-21
- Volume
- 113
- Issue
- 15
- Pages
- 4170-4175
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC4839412
- OpenAlex
- W2306323185
- Semantic Scholar
- 6a29311cc82d2d7b0f7905526d0e9a26fdc39bf4
- Cited by
- 155
- References
- 49
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 18 · 2019: 9 · 2018: 19 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 14.79
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Department of Health, Australian Government | National Health and Medical Research Council (AF30)
- HHS | NIH | National Institute of General Medical Sciences (GM080533)
- Swiss National Science Foundation (P2ZHP3_151594)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health › Zoonotic diseases and public health
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Infectious Diseases › Viral Infections and Outbreaks Research
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Epidemiology › Virology and Viral Diseases
- Keywords
- human-to-human transmission, emerging infectious diseases, viral transmissibility, host mortality, chronic infection, genome segmentation, viral envelope, recombination frequency, vector-borne transmission, RNA viruses, DNA viruses, information theory
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Disease Vectors, Humans, Models, Theoretical, Virus Diseases, Virus Physiological Phenomena, Communicable Diseases, Emerging
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