The Brook Lab of the Department of Ecology and Evolution recently published two papers.
The first one, led by Book Lab postdoctoral researcher Emily Ruhs, with coauthors in Singapore, Australia, and China, was published in September in Frontiers in Public Health and is titled “Applications of VirScan to broad serological profiling of bat reservoirs for emerging zoonoses”. The research applied, for the first time, Phage ImmunoPrecipitation Sequencing (PhIP-Seq), originally developed to comprehensively profile viral exposure history in humans, to bat serum to better understand the viral diversity of the several zoonotic viruses that bats host, with results suggesting that many bat viruses may circulate via complex transmission dynamics. As the authors point out, use of PhIP-Seq highlights the exciting prospect of “expanding human biomedical technology for novel surveillance applications in wildlife reservoirs for emerging human diseases.”
A second paper was authored by Assistant Professor Cara Brook and colleagues and published in PLoS Biology. Titled “Reservoir host immunology and life history shape virulence evolution in zoonotic viruses”, the study sheds light on the mechanisms that determine the virulence of emerging zoonotic viruses. A modeling framework developed by Dr. Brook and colleagues and data analyses show that the physiological differences between reservoir and spillover hosts could be the key to understanding what makes a new virus virulent. Notably, their work offers a mechanistic hypothesis to explain the extreme virulence of bat-borne zoonoses and, more generally, demonstrates how key differences in reservoir host longevity, viral tolerance, and constitutive immunity impact the evolution of viral traits that cause virulence following spillover to humans. With implications for managing future pandemic risk through a better understanding of the mechanisms that determine the virulence of emerging zoonotic viruses, the paper was profiled in a PLoS Biology Primer and highlighted in a Newsweek magazine article.
Meanwhile in the Field…
Brook Lab graduate student Sophia Horigan has just returned from Madagascar, where she successfully deployed GPS tags on the Malagasy flying fox, Pteropus rufus, to track connectivity important for understanding pathogen transmission. The difficulty of field capture is one reason that makes bat virus surveillance so challenging. Congratulations to Sophia for taking researchers one step closer to understanding the broader viral diversity of bats!