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The evolution of age-specific resistance to infectious disease

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posted on 2024-01-12, 12:25 authored by Lydia Buckingham, Emily L Bruns, Ben Ashby
Innate, infection-preventing resistance often varies between host life stages. Juveniles are more resistant than adults in some species, whereas the opposite pattern is true in others. This variation cannot always be explained by prior exposure or physiological constraints and so it has been hypothesized that trade-offs with other life-history traits may be involved. However, little is known about how trade-offs between various life-history traits and resistance at different life stages affect the evolution of age-specific resistance. Here, we use a mathematical model to explore how trade-offs with natural mortality, reproduction and maturation combine to affect the evolution of resistance at different life stages. Our results show that certain combinations of trade-offs have substantial effects on whether adults or juveniles are more resistant, with trade-offs between juvenile resistance and adult reproduction inherently more costly than trade-offs involving maturation or mortality (all else being equal), resulting in consistent evolution of lower resistance at the juvenile stage even when infection causes a lifelong fecundity reduction. Our model demonstrates how the differences between patterns of age-structured resistance seen in nature may be explained by variation in the trade-offs involved and our results suggest conditions under which trade-offs tend to select for lower resistance in juveniles than adults.

Funding

Host-parasite coevolution in complex communities

Natural Environment Research Council

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NSFDEB-NERC: The eco-evolutionary dynamics of age-specific resistance to infectious disease

Natural Environment Research Council

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National Science Foundation (DEB-1936334)

Resistance Variation to Endemic Disease as a Risk Factor to New Disease Emergence

National Institute of General Medical Sciences

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Milner Scholarship PhD grant from The Evolution Education Trust

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Volume

290

Issue

1991

Publisher

Royal Society

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by the Royal Society under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2022-12-22

Publication date

2023-01-25

Copyright date

2023

ISSN

0962-8452

eISSN

1471-2954

Language

  • en

Depositor

Lydia Buckingham. Deposit date: 12 January 2024

Article number

20222000

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