Collaborative Research: Host ocular microbiome and pathogen dynamics: from individual to population-level effects in a songbird

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Animals harbor many microbes that serve key beneficial roles for their hosts, including protection from disease. While the beneficial roles of many microbes are well established, it is not yet known how these benefits scale up to an entire population and influence disease outbreaks in populations. This award focuses on a contagious 'pink- eye' disease of a common songbird, the house finch. Beneficial bacteria in the eyes of finches can protect birds from developing severe 'pink-eye'. This project examines how the dose of infection impacts the ability of beneficial bacteria to protect birds against disease, and whether beneficial bacteria on the eye can prevent or slow down the spread of this highly contagious disease within a flock of birds. Findings of this research will have important implications for understanding infectious disease outbreaks in wildlife, domestic animals, and humans. Investigators will engage undergraduate and graduate students in the use of new genomics tools to identify beneficial microbes. Using this study system and others as examples, project personnel will work with the Science Museum of Western Virginia to design a permanent, interactive 'Friendly Microbes' exhibit that illustrates the many ways that microbes benefit their hosts. Graduate students at Virginia Tech will learn how to better communicate science by assisting with the exhibit design and summer workshops associated with the exhibit. How the microbiome modulates population-level disease spread depends on how symbionts function in host defense across the natural range of infectious doses, as well as how both 'donating' and 'receiving' the pathogen during transmission is modified by symbionts. This award investigates individual to population-level effects of the ocular microbiome on disease dynamics using a tractable wildlife disease system: a recently emerged conjunctival disease of house finches. Using a suite of mechanistic tools and experimental approaches, this project will: 1) test how pathogen colonization dose mediates the protective role of the resident ocular microbiome for individual finches; 2) determine how the ocular microbiome influences the likelihood of donating versus receiving a conjunctival pathogen during pairwise transmission; and 3) quantify the epidemiological impact of the host ocular microbiome on flock-level infectious disease dynamics. Researchers will examine how microbial symbionts alter both host and pathogen phenotypes relevant for transmission and reveal mechanisms of symbiont-pathogen-host interactions that are most likely to influence population-level disease dynamics. The award will provide training to undergraduate and graduate students in population-wide microbiome research as well as scientific communication. Researchers will develop a new, permanent exhibit at the local museum on the beneficial role of microbes and host workshops to promote scientific literacy on this topic.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.