dc.contributor.author | Hayward, AD | |
dc.contributor.author | Nussey, DH | |
dc.contributor.author | Wilson, AJ | |
dc.contributor.author | Berenos, C | |
dc.contributor.author | Pilkington, JG | |
dc.contributor.author | Watt, KA | |
dc.contributor.author | Pemberton, JM | |
dc.contributor.author | Graham, AL | |
dc.date.accessioned | 2018-02-23T12:01:11Z | |
dc.date.issued | 2014-07 | |
dc.description.abstract | Hosts may mitigate the impact of parasites by two broad strategies: resistance, which limits parasite burden, and tolerance, which limits the fitness or health cost of increasing parasite burden. The degree and causes of variation in both resistance and tolerance are expected to influence host-parasite evolutionary and epidemiological dynamics and inform disease management, yet very little empirical work has addressed tolerance in wild vertebrates. Here, we applied random regression models to longitudinal data from an unmanaged population of Soay sheep to estimate individual tolerance, defined as the rate of decline in body weight with increasing burden of highly prevalent gastrointestinal nematode parasites. On average, individuals lost weight as parasite burden increased, but whereas some lost weight slowly as burden increased (exhibiting high tolerance), other individuals lost weight significantly more rapidly (exhibiting low tolerance). We then investigated associations between tolerance and fitness using selection gradients that accounted for selection on correlated traits, including body weight. We found evidence for positive phenotypic selection on tolerance: on average, individuals who lost weight more slowly with increasing parasite burden had higher lifetime breeding success. This variation did not have an additive genetic basis. These results reveal that selection on tolerance operates under natural conditions. They also support theoretical predictions for the erosion of additive genetic variance of traits under strong directional selection and fixation of genes conferring tolerance. Our findings provide the first evidence of selection on individual tolerance of infection in animals and suggest practical applications in animal and human disease management in the face of highly prevalent parasites. | en_GB |
dc.description.sponsorship | This study was funded by Natural Environment Research Council (http://www.nerc.ac.uk/) Standard Grant no. NE/G004854/1 and European Research
Council (http://erc.europa.eu/) Large Grant no. 250098 to JMP. ADH is supported by European Research Council grant no. R/120448-11-1 to V. Lummaa; DHN is
supported by Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/) David Phillips Fellowship no. BB/H021686/1; AJW is supported by
BBSRC David Phillips Fellowship no. BB/G022976/1; ALG is supported by Princeton University and the Research and Policy for Infectious Disease Dynamics
(RAPIDD) program of the Science and Technology Directorate, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Fogarty International Center of the National
Institutes of Health. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.citation | Vol. 12, e1001917 | en_GB |
dc.identifier.doi | 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001917 | |
dc.identifier.other | PBIOLOGY-D-14-00948 | |
dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10871/31631 | |
dc.language.iso | en | en_GB |
dc.publisher | Public Library of Science | en_GB |
dc.relation.source | The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. All relevant data are within the paper and its
Supporting Information file | en_GB |
dc.relation.url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25072883 | en_GB |
dc.rights | © 2014 Hayward et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. | en_GB |
dc.subject | Animals | en_GB |
dc.subject | Body Weight | en_GB |
dc.subject | Female | en_GB |
dc.subject | Gastrointestinal Diseases | en_GB |
dc.subject | Host-Parasite Interactions | en_GB |
dc.subject | Male | en_GB |
dc.subject | Nematode Infections | en_GB |
dc.subject | Parasite Egg Count | en_GB |
dc.subject | Parasite Load | en_GB |
dc.subject | Parasitic Diseases, Animal | en_GB |
dc.subject | Reproduction | en_GB |
dc.subject | Selection, Genetic | en_GB |
dc.subject | Sheep | en_GB |
dc.subject | Sheep Diseases | en_GB |
dc.title | Natural selection on individual variation in tolerance of gastrointestinal nematode infection | en_GB |
dc.type | Article | en_GB |
dc.date.available | 2018-02-23T12:01:11Z | |
exeter.place-of-publication | United States | en_GB |
dc.description | This is the final version of the article. Available from the publisher via the DOI in this record. | en_GB |
dc.identifier.journal | PLoS Biology | en_GB |