Bucknell professors' Ugandan bat studies make National Geographic cover

Lewisburg, Pa. — Bucknell University biology professors DeeAnn Reeder and Ken Field are some of the world's leading researchers of bats. An ongoing five-year study about interactions between bats and the Ebola virus has reached the cover of August's issue of National Geographic.

Reeder, a National Geographic Explorer, and Field were awarded a $2.9 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to investigate how bats in Uganda may be able to carry the Ebola virus without becoming ill. The two professors are being accompanied by a small group of undergraduate Bucknell students and fellow researchers from Muni University.

The study is focusing on three different bat species — two African and one North American — that have varying potential links to the Ebola virus. The NIAID grant, one of the largest in Bucknell’s history, is enabling them to investigate how bats’ unique physiology allows them to host deadly diseases that can spill over to humans.

The National Geographic story reports that the Bucknell researchers and Ugandan scientists are using detailed tests of gene activity to determine how different bats respond to a non-infectious piece of Ebola virus. Reeder, Field, and Muni University’s Imran Ejotre, who earned his master’s degree at Bucknell, are trapping and immunizing bats with Ebola proteins to see how the immune systems of different species cope with a virus-like threat.

“I want to understand how the heck they do all the things that they do, and their immune system is a piece of that. They’re exceptionally good at managing those pathogens to avoid illness themselves,” said Reeder in the magazine story. She was one of the international researchers who published a related April study in Nature Communications on ecological countermeasures to prevent pathogen spillover and subsequent pandemics.

“These viruses do not kill these bats. They don’t even make them sick,” added Field, in the story.

In the final years of the project, the researchers aim to test how bats' ability to rapidly raise their body temperature during flight and then lower it at rest may contribute to their immunity against viruses that are deadly to humans.

Some experimental samples are being brought back to Bucknell for further analysis, and students from Field’s Advanced Data Analysis and Bioinformatics course are conducting high-level analysis of the data.

The Bucknell researchers also provided training to Muni students on new equipment that was gifted to the University and is being used in the study.