Anthropogenic land use change facilitates disease emergence by altering the interface between humans and pathogen reservoirs and is hypothesized to drive pathogen evolution. Here, we show a positive association between land use change and the evolution and dispersal of Zaire ebolavirus (EBOV) and Sudan ebolavirus (SUDV). We update the phylogeographies of EBOV and SUDV, which reveal that the most recent common ancestor of EBOV was circulating around 1960 in the forests of what is now the northwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo, while the most recent common ancestor of SUDV was circulating around 1958 in the southern Sudanese savanna. Both landscapes underwent significant anthropogenic fragmentation between 1940 and 1960, associated with specific colonial “schemes,” which substantially altered local human settlement patterns and the surrounding vegetation to support intensive cash crop agriculture. Since these disturbances, landscape fragmentation was spatiotemporally associated with the divergence and dispersal of new variants of both viruses into new ecoregions of Africa. These variants segregated geographically along ecoregion boundaries, resembling a pattern observable for other bat‐borne viruses. The amino acid changes which characterized each variant disproportionately involved glycosylation‐sensitive amino acids in the surface glycoprotein domain responsible for immune evasion and attachment to host cells, suggesting adaptation to new hosts amidst changing landscapes. Our results show that land use change not only increases the risk of spillover, but also impacts the evolution of viruses themselves.

中文翻译：

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埃博拉病毒的进化和出现与土地利用变化有关


人为土地利用变化通过改变人类与病原体宿主之间的界面来促进疾病的出现，并假设会驱动病原体进化。在这里，我们展示了土地利用变化与扎伊尔埃博拉病毒 （EBOV） 和苏丹埃博拉病毒 （SUDV） 的进化和传播之间存在正相关。我们更新了 EBOV 和 SUDV 的系统地理学，结果显示 EBOV 最近的共同祖先在 1960 年左右在现在刚果民主共和国西北部的森林中传播，而 SUDV 最近的共同祖先在 1958 年左右在苏丹南部稀树草原中传播。1940 年至 1960 年间，这两片景观都经历了严重的人为碎片化，这与特定的殖民“计划”有关，这些计划极大地改变了当地的人类居住模式和周围的植被，以支持集约化经济作物农业。由于这些干扰，景观破碎化在时空上与两种病毒的新变种向非洲新生态区的分化和扩散有关。这些变体沿生态区边界在地理上隔离开来，类似于其他蝙蝠传播病毒可观察到的模式。表征每个变体的氨基酸变化不成比例地涉及表面糖蛋白结构域中负责免疫逃避和附着于宿主细胞的糖基化敏感氨基酸，这表明在不断变化的环境中适应了新的宿主。我们的结果表明，土地利用变化不仅增加了溢出风险，而且还影响了病毒本身的进化。