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

该项目将开发和测试在野生啮齿动物种群中追踪RNA病毒的新方法，这些啮齿动物是世界范围内重要的病毒储存库，因为许多物种生活在人类种群附近，对环境变化高度敏感。大多数影响人类的新兴传染病，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，这些疾病变得更加普遍和广泛，这种模式往往归因于日益加剧的环境变化，特别是自然景观转变为农业和城市环境。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中的传播方式，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可以改变野生动物种群中的病原体流行率，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反过来影响人类风险的知识。该项目将利用在英格兰和乌干达进行的监测野生啮齿动物群落的实地研究来调查这些差距。此外，该项目将涉及联合王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，研究人员将开发新的工具，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病风险。这种灵活的方法将允许快速发现和监测人畜共患病病毒，使流行病学推断，从横断面样本和指导适当的采样策略，以解释新的主机系统中的元病毒数据。研究人员将在英国牛津郡进行一项长期的捕获-标记-再捕获野生动物研究，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着土地覆盖梯度的实地考察点来了解物理环境变化如何影响啮齿动物群落中人畜共患病的风险。这项实地考察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这一梯度上的人畜共患病风险。总之，这项研究将大大提高我们对病毒病原体在关键水库主机的理解，并确定重要的环境驱动因素，增加人畜共患病的风险。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

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.