MolEpidPred: A digital intelligent tool for large scale and quick molecular epidemiology of Foot-and-mouth Disease

Foot-and-mouth Disease (FMD) is one of the economically devastating transboundary animal disease that affects all the cloven-hoofed animals including wildlife. The etiological agent of FMD is a single-stranded positive-sense RNA virus, which is in global circulation with seven serotypes, multiple topotypes, lineages, and sub-lineages within each serotype. Molecular epidemiology of FMD is crucial to implement its control strategies including vaccination and containment. This primarily deals with knowing serotype/topotype/lineage of the virus causing the outbreak using virus capsid sequence data, which requires advanced computational tools. Thus, this article presents a digital intelligent tool (MolEpidPred), primarily developed for FMD molecular epidemiology. The MolEpidPred tool provides independent accuracies of atleast 98%, 90%, and 80% for serotype, topotype, and lineage prediction, respectively. This tool implements multiple machine learning algorithms for prediction of serotype/topotype/lineage of the virus using k-mer features generated from viral capsid sequence. This tool is fast, quick, and scalable for wide molecular epidemiology and is suitable for use across all the FMD-endemic countries in the world.