Advancing genetic tools to understand individual heterogeneity in wildlife-virus interactions

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In humans, age plays an important role in determining the likelihood we will get infected with a virus and how sick we get. Studying long-lived animals that can tolerate being infected by many viruses is likely to give us important insights into how age influences viral infection. Bats are an ideal system for studying these questions because they have unusually long lifespans and can appear healthy while being infected with viruses which cause severe disease in other animals. However, methodological barriers have made it difficult to determine whether older or younger bats tend to have more viral infections, and whether age influences how sick they get from these infections.A first challenge is that it is currently too expensive to study all viruses at the same time within an individual bat, so we have to either group information from entire bat populations (losing information at the individual bat level) or focus on specific viruses. Unfortunately, both approaches give biased information about the viruses present in bats. Another difficulty is that our current methods for determining the age of wild bats lack resolution, and are often unable to age bats during the vast majority of their adult lifespan. Our proposal aims to develop technologies to resolve these difficulties using samples from common vampire bats, a bat species known for its important role in rabies virus transmission in the Americas.Our project will first develop genetic tools to inexpensively study all the viruses within individual bats; this technique has been successfully used for bacteria but has not yet been applied to viruses. We will next determine the age of each bat, using a recently developed 'epigenetic clock' which uses genetic data to age bats from a small piece of wing tissue. We will then link up the data on viruses present in each bat with age and other information to test how individual differences between bats affect the number and type of viruses which infect these animals. Our project will help us understand whether the number and type of viral infections differs predictably for bats of different ages, which would help us to improve studies and management of wild bats in ways that benefit both bat and human health. More broadly, our project will open new frontiers in how we study viruses in animals, and the technologies we develop will help make these advanced methods accessible in low-resource settings.