Temporal and spatial dynamics of clonal lineages in Guyana.

bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology
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Abstract

parasites, the causal agents of malaria, are eukaryotic organisms that obligately undergo sexual recombination within mosquitoes. However, in low transmission settings where most mosquitoes become infected with only a single parasite clone, parasites recombine with themselves, and the clonal lineage is propagated rather than broken up by outcrossing. We investigated whether stochastic/neutral factors drive the persistence and abundance of clonal lineages in Guyana, a country with relatively low malaria transmission, but the only setting in the Americas in which an important artemisinin resistance mutation ( C580Y) has been observed. To investigate whether this clonality was potentially associated with the persistence and spatial spread of the mutation, we performed whole genome sequencing on 1,727 samples collected from infected patients across a five-year period (2016-2021). We characterized the relatedness between each pair of monoclonal infections (n=1,409) through estimation of identity by descent (IBD) and also typed each sample for known or candidate drug resistance mutations. A total of 160 clones (mean IBD ≥ 0.90) were circulating in Guyana during the study period, comprising 13 highly related clusters (mean IBD ≥ 0.40). In the five-year study period, we observed a decrease in frequency of a mutation associated with artemisinin partner drug (piperaquine) resistance ( C350R) and limited co-occurence of C350R with duplications of , an epistatic interaction associated with piperaquine resistance. We additionally report polymorphisms exhibiting evidence of selection for drug resistance or other phenotypes and reported a novel mutation () as well as 61 nonsynonymous substitutions that increased markedly in frequency. However, clonal dynamics in Guyana appear to be largely driven by stochastic factors, in contrast to other geographic regions. The use of multiple artemisinin combination therapies in Guyana may have contributed to the disappearance of the C580Y mutation.

Year of Publication
2024
Journal
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology
Date Published
02/2024
DOI
10.1101/2024.01.31.578156
PubMed ID
38352461
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