Expanded Collaboration with Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases
Back row, left-right: Dr. Rebekah Kading, Dr. Emma Harris, Dr. Tony Schountz. Front row kneeling, left-right: Dr. Juliette Lewis, Erika Zhan. Not pictured: Kalani Williams, Phillida Charley, Maggie Priore, and Anna Fagre.
At Colorado State University (CSU), Drs. Rebekah Kading and Tony Schountz will lead a team of investigators at the CSU Center for Vector-borne Infectious Diseases to support EpiCenter field surveillance activities. The NIH Regional Biocontainment Laboratory at Colorado State University has state-of-the-art Biosafety Level 3 virology laboratories, as well as a colony of Jamaican fruit bats (Artibeus jamaicensis). These facilities and unique resources offer the opportunity to deepen the impact of EpiCenter activities through a BSL-3 research arm to addresses research questions central to the EpiCenter and CREID missions.
Landscape urbanization has the potential to alter infectious disease dynamics either through increased contact between bat reservoir hosts and people, or through environmental changes that enhance viral shedding and spillover risk. CSU will utilize the bat colony to test the hypothesis that dietary shifts will change viral infection and shedding dynamics and are reflected in underlying immune and physiological parameters.
Additionally, the CSU team will generate novel primary cell lines from the wing patagium tissue of wild bats captured in Uganda and Peru for the study of coronaviruses. The availability of taxonomically-relevant cell lines will be a tremendously valuable resource to have within the CREID Network. Finally, the CSU team will perform virus isolation on oral and rectal swabs from field-sampled bats, as well as conduct metabolomic analysis on blood samples, and diet/microbiome analysis of fecal samples from wild bats.
Collectively, these research activities will produce valuable information on how dietary shifts affect viral spillover potential, produce novel data on the physiological profile of free-flying bats, and critically, generate novel resources and protocols for conducting infectious disease research involving bats.
