Principles of dengue virus evolvability derived from genotype-fitness maps in human and mosquito cells

  1. Patrick T Dolan
  2. Shuhei Taguwa
  3. Mauricio Aguilar Rangel
  4. Ashley Acevedo
  5. Tzachi Hagai
  6. Raul Andino  Is a corresponding author
  7. Judith Frydman  Is a corresponding author
  1. University of California, San Francisco, United States
  2. Stanford University, United States
  3. Tel Aviv University, Israel

Abstract

Dengue virus (DENV) cycles between mosquito and mammalian hosts. To examine how DENV populations adapt to these different host environments we used serial passage in human and mosquito cell lines and estimated fitness effects for all single-nucleotide variants in these populations using ultra-deep sequencing. This allowed us to determine the contributions of beneficial and deleterious mutations to the collective fitness of the population. Our analysis revealed that the continuous influx of a large burden of deleterious mutations counterbalances the effect of rare, host-specific beneficial mutations to shape the path of adaptation. Beneficial mutations preferentially map to intrinsically disordered domains in the viral proteome and cluster to defined regions in the genome. These phenotypically redundant adaptive alleles may facilitate host-specific DENV adaptation. Importantly, the evolutionary constraints described in our simple system mirror trends observed across DENV and Zika strains, indicating it recapitulates key biophysical and biological constraints shaping long-term viral evolution.

Data availability

- All data has been deposited and is available at the persistent URL: https://purl.stanford.edu/gv159td5450- All code for analysis and figure generation is deposited in GitHub: https://github.com/ptdolan/Dolan_Taguwa_Dengue_2020- Sequencing Data has been deposited as BioProject: PRJNA669406

The following data sets were generated

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Patrick T Dolan

    Microbiology and Immunology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-4169-0058
  2. Shuhei Taguwa

    Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Mauricio Aguilar Rangel

    Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Ashley Acevedo

    Microbiology and Immunology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  5. Tzachi Hagai

    George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  6. Raul Andino

    Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, United States
    For correspondence
    raul.andino@ucsf.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0001-5503-9349
  7. Judith Frydman

    Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, United States
    For correspondence
    jfrydman@stanford.edu
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
    ORCID icon "This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0003-2302-6943

Funding

National Institutes of Health (AI127447,AI36178,AI091575,F32GM113483)

  • Patrick T Dolan
  • Raul Andino
  • Judith Frydman

Naito Foundation

  • Shuhei Taguwa

Uehara Memorial Foundation

  • Shuhei Taguwa

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Copyright

© 2021, Dolan et al.

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Metrics

  • 4,438
    views
  • 585
    downloads
  • 36
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Patrick T Dolan
  2. Shuhei Taguwa
  3. Mauricio Aguilar Rangel
  4. Ashley Acevedo
  5. Tzachi Hagai
  6. Raul Andino
  7. Judith Frydman
(2021)
Principles of dengue virus evolvability derived from genotype-fitness maps in human and mosquito cells
eLife 10:e61921.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.61921

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.61921

Further reading

    1. Ecology
    2. Evolutionary Biology
    Justine Boutry, Océane Rieu ... Fréderic Thomas
    Research Article

    While host phenotypic manipulation by parasites is a widespread phenomenon, whether tumors, which can be likened to parasite entities, can also manipulate their hosts is not known. Theory predicts that this should nevertheless be the case, especially when tumors (neoplasms) are transmissible. We explored this hypothesis in a cnidarian Hydra model system, in which spontaneous tumors can occur in the lab, and lineages in which such neoplastic cells are vertically transmitted (through host budding) have been maintained for over 15 years. Remarkably, the hydras with long-term transmissible tumors show an unexpected increase in the number of their tentacles, allowing for the possibility that these neoplastic cells can manipulate the host. By experimentally transplanting healthy as well as neoplastic tissues derived from both recent and long-term transmissible tumors, we found that only the long-term transmissible tumors were able to trigger the growth of additional tentacles. Also, supernumerary tentacles, by permitting higher foraging efficiency for the host, were associated with an increased budding rate, thereby favoring the vertical transmission of tumors. To our knowledge, this is the first evidence that, like true parasites, transmissible tumors can evolve strategies to manipulate the phenotype of their host.

    1. Evolutionary Biology
    2. Microbiology and Infectious Disease
    Zach Hensel
    Short Report

    Accurate estimation of the effects of mutations on SARS-CoV-2 viral fitness can inform public-health responses such as vaccine development and predicting the impact of a new variant; it can also illuminate biological mechanisms including those underlying the emergence of variants of concern. Recently, Lan et al. reported a model of SARS-CoV-2 secondary structure and its underlying dimethyl sulfate reactivity data (Lan et al., 2022). I investigated whether base reactivities and secondary structure models derived from them can explain some variability in the frequency of observing different nucleotide substitutions across millions of patient sequences in the SARS-CoV-2 phylogenetic tree. Nucleotide basepairing was compared to the estimated ‘mutational fitness’ of substitutions, a measurement of the difference between a substitution’s observed and expected frequency that is correlated with other estimates of viral fitness (Bloom and Neher, 2023). This comparison revealed that secondary structure is often predictive of substitution frequency, with significant decreases in substitution frequencies at basepaired positions. Focusing on the mutational fitness of C→U, the most common type of substitution, I describe C→U substitutions at basepaired positions that characterize major SARS-CoV-2 variants; such mutations may have a greater impact on fitness than appreciated when considering substitution frequency alone.