winning big & small
by Nichola, July 13, 2024
Sometimes you find yourself surrounded by talented young scientists, and you just want to shout it from the treetops, or cliffside gull rookery might be more appropriate in this case.
Jonathan Dain, our graduate student, narrowly missed out on an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Sigh. The GRP is getting more competitive these days with a larger number of students proposing ever-more polished ideas, and he took the setback like a champ. If you’ve ever met Jonathan, you know that his relentless optimism is fueled by a curiosity of the natural world that knows no bounds. He parlayed his GRFP study to identify super-spreaders of the current bird flu outbreak into a Nantucket Biodiversity Institute (NBI) and American Ornithological Society (AOS) proposal and was awarded both! Thanks to these non-profit awards, Jonathan will be sampling wild birds across New England this summer and using multi-omics to understand which species and ecological conditions play a role in virus transmission.
Then there’s Kate, our postdoc and metagenomics whizz. Kate loves studying viruses, the more the better. She loves studying the entire collection of viruses (virome) that occurs in an animal, and how those viruses interact with each other. After a trip to Appledore Island in Maine to visit the gull breeding colony, she hatched an idea to study the early-life virome of gulls and test whether the virome of offspring is inherited from parents or other external influences. The early-life virome is very influential on health later in life in animals - from gulls to humans - and can predict whether subsequent infections are mild, severe or life-threatening. Kate was awarded a prestigious Healey award from the University of Massachusetts to carry out this study over the course of the next year.
Alright, enough bragging from me about these clever folks. Let’s go get those samples!
The VirusPlus Lab from left to right: Melba (former grad student), Kate (postdoc), Nichola (PI, ahem, me!) and Jonathan (grad student) at the lab on Nantucket Island. This is what we look like after coming back from a long day in the field with our precious samples.
Great Black-backed Gulls nesting on Appledore Island. This is the place that Jonathan and Kate will spend lots of time studying this summer. It’s dreamy out here and the gulls are masters of the island.
Is bird flu the next pandemic? Here’s What we KnoW
by Nichola, July 6, 2023
It’s an important question that our lab gets asked a lot these days! We wrote an opinion article for the Boston Globe to share our thoughts about why we need to start paying closer attention to bird flu.
The strain known as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) of the H5N1 subtype has resulted in the biggest wildlife mortality event in history and the expanding host range of the virus poses risks for how the virus jumps into new hosts. Of the 1,000 species of wild birds in the United States, over 150 species have now been infected with H5N1, including iconic species such as Bald Eagles, Red-tailed Hawks, and nesting seabirds, such as Common and Roseate Terns. Check out Figure 1 (made by Jonathan Dain and Melba Torres Sosa, our two new grad students!) to see how the host range of the virus is increasing over time based on USDA data collected over the last two years.
In addition, HPAI H5N1 now has a host range that has expanded beyond the avian reservoir. Infections have been reported in wild mammals ranging from grizzly bears, raccoons, bobcats, and skunks, with red foxes accounting for half of the 110 mammalian infections occurring in the US. Luckily, we have seen only individual mutations and not the required 3 to 5 mutations that would allow HPAI H5N1 to replicate in the upper airways, rather than deeper in the lungs — a transition that would open the door for human-to-human spread. Figure 2 (right side, bottom) shows a possible pathway for bird flu to become a pandemic in humans, involving mutations that change the function and stability of the virus. Becoming a pandemic virus involves a lot of steps, and luckily we are right at the bottom, having only seen mutations in the PB2 and HA genes in either wild or domestic animals.
We also discuss solutions from vaccination to small-scale agriculture and farming of resistant breeds of indigenous poultry in a Nature Magazine article. Stay tuned for updates!
Figure 1. The increasing host range of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI H5N1) in wild birds since introduction into the US in late 2021. Each pink bar represents the cumulative total of bird species infected that month. Data are sourced from APHIS USDA.
Figure 2. The steps required for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI H5N1) to adapt from wild birds to humans. There are multiple mutations across different proteins that are needed for influenza to jump from birds to mammals, starting with the polymerase enzyme (PB2).