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The populations of many pathogen species consist of a collection of common and rare strains but the factors underlying this strain-specific variation in frequency are often unknown. Understanding frequency variation among strains is particularly challenging for vector-borne pathogens where the strain-specific fitness depends on the performance in both the vertebrate host and the arthropod vector. Two sympatric multiple-strain tick-borne pathogens,  Borrelia afzelii  and  B. garinii , that use the same tick vector,  Ixodes ricinus , but different vertebrate hosts were studied. 454-sequencing of the polymorphic  ospC  gene was used to characterize the community of  Borrelia  strains in a local population of  I. ricinus  ticks over a period of 11 years. Estimates of the reproduction number (R 0 ), a measure of fitness, were obtained for six strains of  B. afzelii  from a previous laboratory study. There was substantial variation in prevalence among strains and some strains were consistently common whereas other strains were consistently rare. In  B. afzelii , the strain-specific estimates of R 0  in laboratory mice explained over 70% of the variation in the prevalences of the strains in our local population of ticks. Our study shows that laboratory estimates of fitness can predict the community structure of multiple-strain pathogens in the field.

Fitness estimates from experimental infections predict the long-term strain structure of a vector-borne pathogen in the field