US-UK Collab: Integrating metaviromics with epidemiological dynamics: understanding virus transmission in the Anthropocene

美英合作：将元病毒组学与流行病学动态相结合：了解人类世的病毒传播

• 批准号: 2308273
• 负责人: Barbara Han
• 金额: $ 300万
• 依托单位: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-09-01 至 2028-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2308273&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: US; UK; Collab; Integrating; metaviromics

This project will develop and test new methods for tracking RNA viruses in wild rodent populations, which are important viral reservoirs worldwide because many species live in close proximity to human populations and are highly responsive to environmental change. Most emerging infectious diseases affecting humans, including AIDS, influenza, and COVID-19, are caused by RNA viruses originating from non-human animals. In recent years, these diseases have become more common and widespread, a pattern frequently attributed to increasing environmental change, notably the conversion of natural landscapes into agricultural and urban environments. These changes have dramatically altered wild animal communities, influencing how viruses circulate within these communities and simultaneously increasing human exposure to new animal viruses. Seasonal variation and climate change can also alter pathogen prevalence in wild animal populations and influence disease risk. A critical barrier to controlling future viral outbreaks is a lack of knowledge about how environmental change affects virus transmission within wild animal populations and how, in turn, that affects human risk. This project will investigate these gaps using established field studies in England and Uganda that monitor wild rodent communities. Additionally, this project will involve researchers in the United Kingdom and Uganda, and provide training for undergraduates, graduate students, and post-doctoral scholars. To tackle the practical challenges of studying viral transmission, researchers will develop new tools to infer epidemiological dynamics and zoonotic risk from increasingly accessible and low-cost host virome data. This flexible approach will allow rapid discovery and monitoring of zoonotic viruses by enabling epidemiological inferences from cross-sectional samples and guidance for appropriate sampling strategies to interpret metaviromic data in new host systems. Researchers will use a long-term capture-mark-recapture wild study in Oxfordshire, UK, to determine how seasonal environmental change influences rodent viral communities. Lastly, researchers will use field sites along land cover gradient in Uganda to understand how physical environmental change influences the risk of zoonotics in rodent communities. This fieldwork will identify local and landscape drivers of zoonotic hazards and how humans change behaviour to affect zoonotic risk across this gradient. Together, this research will substantially improve our understanding of viral pathogens within key reservoir hosts and identify important environmental drivers that increase zoonotic risk.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该项目将开发和测试追踪野生啮齿动物种群中 RNA 病毒的新方法，野生啮齿动物种群是全世界重要的病毒库，因为许多物种生活在靠近人类的地方，并且对环境变化高度敏感。大多数影响人类的新发传染病，包括艾滋病、流感和 COVID-19，都是由源自非人类动物的 RNA 病毒引起的。近年来，这些疾病变得更加常见和普遍，这种模式通常归因于环境变化的加剧，特别是自然景观向农业和城市环境的转变。这些变化极大地改变了野生动物群落，影响了病毒在这些群落内的传播方式，同时增加了人类接触新动物病毒的机会。季节变化和气候变化也会改变野生动物种群中病原体的流行情况并影响疾病风险。控制未来病毒爆发的一个关键障碍是缺乏关于环境变化如何影响野生动物种群内病毒传播以及如何影响人类风险的知识。该项目将利用英格兰和乌干达监测野生啮齿动物群落的实地研究来调查这些差距。此外，该项目还将涉及英国和乌干达的研究人员，并为本科生、研究生和博士后学者提供培训。为了应对研究病毒传播的实际挑战，研究人员将开发新工具，从越来越容易获得和低成本的宿主病毒组数据中推断流行病学动态和人畜共患风险。这种灵活的方法将通过从横截面样本中进行流行病学推断并指导适当的采样策略来解释新宿主系统中的元病毒学数据，从而能够快速发现和监测人畜共患病毒。研究人员将在英国牛津郡进行一项长期的捕获-标记-再捕获野生研究，以确定季节性环境变化如何影响啮齿动物病毒群落。最后，研究人员将利用乌干达沿土地覆盖梯度的实地考察，了解自然环境变化如何影响啮齿动物群落中人畜共患病的风险。这项实地工作将确定人畜共患病危害的当地和景观驱动因素，以及人类如何改变行为以影响整个梯度的人畜共患风险。总之，这项研究将大大提高我们对关键储存宿主内病毒病原体的了解，并确定增加人畜共患风险的重要环境驱动因素。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查进行评估，被认为值得支持标准。