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Principal Investigator: Kristian Michael Forbes
Organization: UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS AT FAYETTEVILLE
Fiscal Year: 2024
Award: $759,802
Funding agency: National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
PROJECT SUMMARY
The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the significance of emerging infectious diseases for human health and
security. Bats have been associated with high-profile viral emergence events, including SARS-CoV-2 (the
causative agent of COVID-19), ebolaviruses, and a variety of zoonotic and almost invariably lethal lyssaviruses.
While much recent research has investigated virus diversity in bats, it is largely unknown how infection processes
in bats and their behavior shape virus exposure risk for other species. Exposure is the obligatory first step for
pathogen spillover and one of the strongest points for intervention in the process leading to the emergence of
new human diseases. Further, bat displacements are commonly used to mitigate human risks posed by bat-
borne viruses in low-income settings. Yet, how displacements and other perturbations affect viral exposure and
spillover risk is not known, largely because the necessary longitudinal monitoring is rarely undertaken and is
frustrated by challenges of appropriate controls and monitoring rare viruses in difficult to capture animals. This
project will focus on three important and unusually tractable host-virus systems: coronaviruses, rabies virus, and
Bombali ebolavirus in their wild bat hosts in Taita Hills, Kenya and Orange Walk, Belize. We will use a
combination of longitudinal monitoring, bat behavior studies, and field experiments to examine how virus
shedding dynamics in bat populations and bat use of anthropogenic structures shape virus exposure risk for
humans and domestic animals that can act as intermediate hosts. To explore generalizability across viruses and
assess whether perturbation triggers the shedding of latent viruses, we will further use proteomic and
metagenomic approaches to characterize stress and immunological responses to perturbations and measure
viral diversity shifts at a community level. Our multidisciplinary approach will confront field-collected virus
serological, shedding, and sequence data with competing epidemiological models to elucidate fundamental
principles driving viral infection and shedding from bats (aim 1); employ anthropogenic roost selection and use
surveys to identify local- and landscape-level areas where human encounters with bats and virus are greatest
(aim 2); and conduct controlled experimental displacements of wild bats through roost evictions to quantify the
responses of bat stress, immunity, and viral communities to this common occurrence (aim 3). Together, these
studies will represent an unusually comprehensive and detailed investigation into the dynamics of viruses in wild
bat populations and provide a critical advance towards evidence-based risk evaluation and prevention.
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