Project description:Pilot study on leaves from Papua New Guinea showing soil toxicity, extracted in RNAlater in one case and MQ water in another, also MQ blanks
Project description:Bats are speculated to be reservoirs of several emerging viruses including coronaviruses (CoVs) that cause serious disease in humans and agricultural animals. These include CoVs that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), porcine epidemic diarrhea (PED) and severe acute diarrhea syndrome (SADS). Bats that are naturally infected or experimentally infected do not demonstrate clinical signs of disease. These observations have allowed researchers to speculate that bats are the likely reservoirs or ancestral hosts for several CoVs. In this review, we follow the CoV outbreaks that are speculated to have originated in bats. We review studies that have allowed researchers to identify unique adaptation in bats that may allow them to harbor CoVs without severe disease. We speculate about future studies that are critical to identify how bats can harbor multiple strains of CoVs and factors that enable these viruses to "jump" from bats to other mammals. We hope that this review will enable readers to identify gaps in knowledge that currently exist and initiate a dialogue amongst bat researchers to share resources to overcome present limitations.
Project description:SARS-CoV-2 has caused the largest known coronavirus pandemic and is believed to have emerged from insectivorous bats. Little is known about the evolution of these viruses in their reservoir bat species. In this study, we investigated SARS-CoV-2-host interaction using human and bat cells. Bat cells mount a robust and early antiviral response but elicit a dampened pro-inflammatory response upon SARS-CoV-2 infection compared to human cells. Furthermore, an inactivating R685P mutation within the furin cleavage site (FCS) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein was naturally selected for in infected bat cells. Taken together, our data demonstrate that insectivorous bat cells have evolved a differential antiviral immune response against SARS-CoV-2 infection, likely to mitigate immunopathology that is observed in humans. Our study sheds light on the evolution of sarbecoviruses in bats and extends molecular evidence to data from field studies that have demonstrated that SARS-CoV-2-related viruses in wild-caught bats lack an intact FCS.
Project description:Bats can harbor many pathogens without showing disease. However, the mechanisms by which bats resolve these infections or limit pathology remain unclear. To illuminate the bat immune response to coronaviruses, viruses with high public health significance, we will use serum proteomics to assess broad differences in immune proteins of uninfected and infected vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus). In contrast to global profiling techniques of blood such as transcriptomics, proteomics provides a unique perspective into immunology, as the serum proteome includes proteins from not only blood but also those secreted from proximal tissues. Here, we expand our recent work on the serum proteome of wild vampire bats (Desmodus rotundus) to better understand CoV pathogenesis. Across 19 bats sampled in 2019 in northern Belize with available sera, we detected CoVs in oral or rectal swabs from four individuals. We used data independent acquisition-based mass spectrometry to profile and compare the undepleted serum proteome of these 19 bats. These results will provide much needed insight into changes in the bat serum proteome in response to coronavirus infection.
