StrainHub: a phylogenetic tool to construct pathogen transmission networks
Abstract
In exploring the epidemiology of infectious diseases, networks have been used to reconstruct contacts among individuals and/or populations. Summarizing networks using pathogen metadata (e.g. host species and place of isolation) and a phylogenetic tree is a nascent, alternative approach. In this paper, we introduce a tool for reconstructing transmission networks in arbitrary space from phylogenetic information and metadata. Our goals are to provide a means of deriving new insights and infection control strategies based on the dynamics of the pathogen lineages derived from networks and centrality metrics. We created a web-based application, called StrainHub, in which a user can input a phylogenetic tree based on genetic or other data along with characters derived from metadata using their preferred tree search method. StrainHub generates a transmission network based on character state changes in metadata, such as place or source of isolation, mapped on the phylogenetic tree. The user has the option to calculate centrality metrics on the nodes including betweenness, closeness, degree and a new metric, the source/hub ratio. The outputs include the network with values for metrics on its nodes and the tree with characters reconstructed. All of these results can be exported for further analysis.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Aug 16, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1093/bioinformatics/btz646
Entities
People
- Adriano de Bernardi Schneider
- Colby T Ford
- Daniel Janies
- Joel O. Wertheim
- John D. Williams
- Michael Cioce
- Reilly Hostager
- Umit Catalyurek
Organizations
- Defense Threat Reduction Agency
- Georgia Tech
- National Institutes of Health
- University of California, San Diego
- University of North Carolina at Charlotte