International Research Team Awarded Fellowship for Coronavirus Research

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NORMAN, OKLA. An international team led by Daniel Becker, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Oklahoma, has received a Long-Term Fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program. This award will foster collaboration between OU and interdisciplinary researchers from India and Canada to study coronaviruses in fruit bats.

Becker, whose research focuses on the spread of disease between populations and species, will work alongside B.R. Ansil, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in India, and Arinjay Banerjee from the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization in Canada, to examine why stressed fruit bats may shed more viruses than non-stressed bats.

“Normally, bats carry dangerous viruses without really getting sick themselves. They’ve evolved with these viruses for millions of years,” Becker said. “The main hypothesis is that they only start to become infectious and pose a risk to humans when they get physiologically stressed.”

Bats can become stressed during pregnancy, during migration, when food is scarce or when their habitat is disrupted, for example. When stressed, they likely have difficulty controlling the viruses in their bodies and, thus, become infectious. Becker’s team will attempt to identify why and how this process works. Ansil will help tackle the fieldwork, sample analysis and downstream computations, while Banerjee will help develop cell line models of infection using bat tissues.

“This fellowship is an exciting opportunity for me as it will allow me to delve into the fascinating disease ecology system of bats and viruses,” Ansil said. “Not only will it help me broaden my research skills, but it will also contribute to frontier research.

Visiting the same location in Belize as Becker’s prior research, the team will analyze bat saliva and feces to determine the amount of virus present. They will also take samples of fruit bat tissue for Banerjee to infect with viruses. By infecting tissue samples instead of live bats, this research will be safer, easier to manage and more humane.

“Once the bat cells are infected with viruses, we’ll stress them with cortisol and see how they respond immunologically,” Becker said. “Are they more likely to get infected? Is the virus better able to replicate in cells that are stressed? What lessons from this research can we apply to other projects or fields of disease research?”

By combining field and lab research, Becker’s team, which also includes several OU graduate and postdoctoral researchers, hopes to shed light on how bat cells respond to stress and how that stress impacts the virality of coronaviruses present in their bodies—an important idea in the field of disease ecology.