Evolutionary analysis supports variation in life history strategies between three foot-and-mouth-disease-virus serotypes

Viruses have diverse life history strategies driven by variation in traits such as infectivity, transmission mode, and length and severity of infection that affect their epidemiology and evolution. While well documented among different species, life history and phenotypic variation among variants of the same virus species are less well understood. Foot-and-mouth-disease-virus (FMDV) is an ungulate-infecting picornavirus endemic to many regions, including Sub-Saharan Africa, where it circulates between wildlife and livestock in several serotypes. Recent work suggested that FMDV variants from the three Southern-African Territories serotypes exhibit different life history strategies, with these dynamics potentially causing distinct signatures in viral evolutionary rate, transmission among host species, and movement among regions. To investigate whether any effects of predicted effects occurred in natural settings, and whether these differences were shared with other strains within each serotype, this study used 716 published FMDV sequences (approximately 430bp) from 3 serotypes (SAT1, SAT2, and SAT3) to measure and compare evolutionary rates and transmission between regions and host types in Southern Africa. SAT1 had a slower rate of evolution consistent with a predicted more chronic infection strategy, and SAT2 had higher variability in evolutionary rates and some evidence of transmission from livestock to wildlife, suggesting livestock may play a part in persistence. SAT3 showed an expected intermediate phenotype but was challenging to validate due to small sample size. All SATs showed similar levels of transmission between regions. These results suggest that SAT1, SAT2, and SAT3 exhibit different transmission dynamics and evolutionary signatures, consistent with different life history strategies observed in their representative strains, such as more latency or a multi-host maintenance community.