Some diseases which are fatal in one species can cause only mild discomfort in another—but it’s hard for scientists to predict how lethal a disease will be if it leaps across species.
However, a new paper published this week in PNAS indicates that the evolutionary relationship between infected hosts can predict the impact of diseases.
An international research team led by a Ï㽶ÊÓƵ researcher used a simple experiment that mimics how plants and animals interact with each other—leaving seeds out for 24 hours to see how many get eaten. Seven thousand seed beds were deployed across a huge geographic scale, with 70 sites cutting across 18 mountains from Alaska to the equator.
Published on January 21 |
