iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

For all those at @eeid2026.bsky.social, come to my poster (#21) at the 6pm session tonight to talk about Crimean-Congo Haemorrhagic Fever virus (CCHFV) evolution!! Bonus discussions of bunyavirus ecology, ancient livestock trade, and applications of phylodynamic methods! 🐂📈📜

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 22/04/2026

Incredibly excited to see our work on Jamestown Canyon virus published in Current Biology!! I have grown with and loved this project for 3 years and couldn’t be prouder of the final paper 🩵🧬 Read it here to see how phylodynamics reveals JCV's complex life cycle! www.cell.com/current-biol...

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

We estimate JCV spreads only ~30–60 km²/year, a relatively slow rate for a mosquito-borne virus. This may reflect how univoltine Aedes mosquitoes maintain the virus in restricted areas across years, while multivoltine mosquitoes drive short-term bursts of spread.

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Although we detected JCV in 26 mosquito species, discrete trait analyses show it spends ~80–90% of its evolutionary time in univoltine Aedes mosquitoes. These early-season, single-brood mosquitoes drive long-term persistence, while multivoltine species likely sustain transmission later in summer.

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

Our phylodynamic analyses suggest JCV has been circulating in the Northeast for centuries: introduced by at least the early 1700s, with major lineages entering Connecticut between the mid-1800s and mid-1900s. This suggests that JCV has persisted through major ecological shifts in the Northeast!

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

We estimate that JCV evolves at ~3 × 10⁻⁵ substitutions/site/year, making it one of the slowest-evolving known RNA viruses! After breaking this estimate into seasonal time periods, we think this is because it spends ~10 months per year in evolutionary stasis while overwintering in mosquito eggs.

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

We generated 658 whole-genome JCV sequences from the Northeast US, including 84% of all JCV-positive mosquitoes collected in Connecticut from 1997–2022, expanding available genomic data nearly 17-fold.

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Ellie Bourgikos @ebourgikos.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

JCV is widespread across North America, but we’ve known surprisingly little about how it spreads, evolves, or persists. This gap has made it hard to assess risk or understand its epidemiology. We propose that different types of mosquitoes play unique roles in maintaining and spreading the virus!

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