About this Research Topic
The outbreak and transmission of disease-causing pathogens are affecting wildlife populations worldwide, often with devastating consequences. Recent technological advances in genomic sciences and increasingly affordable sequencing approaches have coalesced into powerful tools to monitor, detect, and reconstruct the role of pathogens impacting wildlife populations. Although genomics has become a mainstay in public health research—especially in diseases affecting humans and livestock—it remains relatively underutilized in wildlife disease research. Wildlife researchers are thus uniquely positioned to merge ecological and evolutionary studies with genomic technologies to exploit unprecedented ‘Big Data’ tools in disease research.
This intersecting field, which combines advances in genomics with wildlife biology and disease ecology, provides crucial information in the preservation of global biodiversity and zoonotic disease emergence. The aim of this article collection is to highlight the remarkable and recent advances that comprise the cutting edge of wildlife disease genomics.
The proposed article collection will present original research, perspectives, and brief communications focused on an array of wildlife species diseases. A key feature for manuscripts will be the application of genomics to address disease in wild species, ex situ or managed populations, and/or their domesticated relatives also affected by disease. The general subcategories of the collection may include but are not limited to:
• Landscape and population genomics of host and pathogen systems
• Phylogenomics and evolutionary genomics of host and pathogen systems
• Comparative genomics of pathogens and pathogen discovery
• The impact of disease on host biodiversity genomics and conservation
• Surveillance and discovery of emerging pathogens in wildlife hosts
• Genomics of resistance/tolerance to disease
We encourage submissions from those researchers investigating disease in wild animal taxa with perspectives ranging from comparative biology, veterinary sciences and animal health; ecology and evolutionary biology; systematics and taxonomy. We are interested in all categories of disease including fungal pathogens, metazoan parasites, protozoans, bacteria, viruses, prions, transmissible tumors, and toxins.
Keywords: disease ecology, wildlife disease genomics, animal health, pathogens, host pathogen systems
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
