Genómica Eco-Evolutiva de la Adaptación de Vibrio a un Planeta en Calentamiento

Climate change is driving complex ecological changes across the world. This has implications for pathogens sensitive to environmental and ecological changes, particularly for those associated with water-borne diseases amidst a changing marine environment. However, we have little insight into how climate change impacts evolutionary responses within climate-sensitive pathogen populations, such as the emergence of dominant variants from highly variable genomic backgrounds and subsequent global dispersal. Vibrio bacteria, a group of marine pathogens causing gastroenteritis, represent a tangible example of a climate-sensitive pathogen under global expansion in response to climate change, containing the only two marine pathogens (V. cholerae and V. parahaemolyticus) that have undergone worldwide expansions and caused epidemics on a global scale. Vibrio spp. are therefore a uniquely placed species to facilitate the study of possible eco-evolutionary drivers of a marine pathogen. In a previous project, we had identified specific knowledge gaps and created a fit-for-purpose methodological framework to facilitate exploring population- specific eco-evolutionary dynamics of climate-sensitive pathogens, combining genomic and environmental data. This interdisciplinary framework will be applied in the present project to gain a basic understanding of key elements to of the ecology, evolution and epidemiology of Vibrio pathogens in a planet under the effects of climate change. With the participation of an interdisciplinary team, this project aims to decipher why epidemic clones emerge in specific regions of endemicity with warm climates and identify the existence of biogeographical patterns across the planet associated with distinctive gene pools and variants selected by climatic conditions. We will apply this knowledge to investigate the population dynamics and evolutionary processes in areas of non-endemicity recently identified as hotspot of disease emergence and under the influence of climate change in the Iberian Peninsula (Cádiz and Galicia) and investigate the impact of basic process such as migration and admixture associated with introduced variants on the evolutionary landscape. A third element of this project will be directed to unravel the role of the oceans in the long-range transport of Vibrio populations and the contribution of these dispersals to the demography of Vibrio at local scale, in particular in those areas of disease emergence. Specifically for this project, delineating oceanic dispersal and interconnectivity of Vibrio populations across the Atlantic Ocean and the potential the impact of these processes on Vibrio demography in those hotspot areas under evaluation along the Atlantic coast of the Iberian Peninsula. This project will provide novel insights into the understanding of global Vibrio eco-evolutionary dynamics as a response to changes in their marine environment. Potential future directions of research will be identified, including the operationalisation of risk models, tracking Vibrio expansion into new regions and the development of robust Vibrio surveillance systems to increase future predictive capacity and improve our understanding of such complex eco-evolutionary dynamics.