RESEARCH Open Access Viral diversity and clonal evolution from unphased genomic data

Background: Clonal expansion is a process in which a single organism reproduces asexually, giving rise to a diversifying population. It is pervasive in nature, from within-host pathogen evolution to emergent infectious disease outbreaks. Standard phylogenetic tools rely on full-length genomes of individual pathogens or population consensus sequences (phased genotypes). Although high-throughput sequencing technologies are able to sample population diversity, the short sequence reads inherent to them preclude assessing whether two reads originate from the same clone (unphased genotypes). This obstacle severely limits the application of phylogenetic methods and investigation of within-host dynamics of acute infections using this rich data source. Methods: We introduce two measures of diversity to study the evolution of clonal populations using unphased genomic data, which eliminate the need to construct full-length genomes. Our method follows a maximum likelihood approach to estimate evolutionary rates and times to the most recent common ancestor, based on a relaxed molecular clock model; independent of a growth model. Deviations from neutral evolution indicate the presence of selection and bottleneck events. Results: We evaluated our methods in silico and then compared it against existing approaches with the well