چکیده (انگلیسی):

Mycobacterium bovis is the causal agent of bovine tuberculosis, one of the most important diseases cur-rently facing the UK cattle industry. Here, we use high-density whole genome sequencing (WGS) in adefined sub-population of M. bovis in 145 cattle across 66 herd breakdowns to gain insights into localspread and persistence. We show that despite low divergence among isolates, WGS can in principle exposecontributions of under-sampled host populations to M. bovis transmission. However, we demonstrate thatin our data such a signal is due to molecular type switching, which had been previously undocumentedfor M. bovis. Isolates from farms with a known history of direct cattle movement between them did notshow a statistical signal of higher genetic similarity. Despite an overall signal of genetic isolation by dis-tance, genetic distances also showed no apparent relationship with spatial distance among affected farmsover distances <5 km. Using simulations, we find that even over the brief evolutionary timescale coveredby our data, Bayesian phylogeographic approaches are feasible. Applying such approaches showed thatM. bovis dispersal in this system is heterogeneous but slow overall, averaging 2 km/year. These resultsconfirm that widespread application of WGS to M. bovis will bring novel and important insights into thedynamics of M. bovis spread and persistence, but that the current questions most pertinent to control willbe best addressed using approaches that more directly integrate WGS with additional epidemiologicaldata.