Eventually, experts say, WGS likely will be used not only to track outbreaks of pathogens but also to catalog the microbes present in a given environment and the ways in which patients and staff move these microbes from place to place, ward to ward, and person to person.
Molecular epidemiology involves tracking the spread of pathogens to determine the sources of disease outbreaks and to understand the dynamics of those outbreaks (van Belkum et al. 2001; Hall and Barlow 2006).
Is the private sector willing to provide such expertise, to perform 'contact-tracing', the unique NHS service which helps us track the spread of pathogens and identify outbreaks?
Now, by employing genome sequencing and statistical models used to track the source of pathogens, researchers have found the strongest evidence to date that bacteria detected in a population of gray seals originated from a human source.
Many food safety-related studies require tracking of introduced foodborne pathogens to monitor their fate in complex environments.
Such baselines allow tracking of changes in pathogen diversity and genetics, as well as differentiation between new detection versus true emergence of diseases.
In future investigations, we believe that application of parallel mass-sequencing technologies to F. tularensis will be highly valuable for identifying additional genetic markers that, in turn, will facilitate tracking of the zoonotic pathogen through environmental sources, blood-feeding arthropods, and mammals.
The model keeps track of various pathogen lineages that give rise to new lineages through mutation that implicitly occurs at the transmission stage.
We currently have a good system of tracking pathogens after they have entered the food supply and caused disease.
Such comparisons might reveal strain-specific features involved in virulence, which could lead to development of genotyping methods for tracking emerging pathogens and of new vaccines.
