One of the top “unsolved problems” in biology is the need to untangle complex networks of species interactions - perhaps nowhere is this more consequential than our need to grapple with the socioecological risks of neglected tropical diseases. Human-livestock-wildlife parasite transmission has been declared a major biomedical challenge for the 21st century with reasons for concern that include the potential for zoonotic helminths—parasitic worms such as nematodes (roundworms), cestodes (tapeworms), and trematodes (flukes) to be transmitted between humans and animals. The effects cause malnutrition, developmental delays, and deaths that disproportionately affect communities undergoing rapid development.

A critical problem is that our strategies to identify and track wildlife parasites originated to combat livestock diseases a century ago. We know very little about how to answer the question: What parasites infect tropical wildlife? We know far more about the subset of parasites that harm humans and livestock than all others. Consequently, our conservation partners struggle to identify the parasites they encounter, hindering our collective efforts to rehabilitate endangered species, evaluate emerging health threats, and treat diseases.

Fortunately, we have just received a Catalyst award from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society to pursue new strategies. Today, the gold-standard method for studying gastrointestinal helminth parasites in wildlife is rooted in taxonomy. Identifying parasites and evaluating their potential to harm hosts requires us to inspect adult parasites from dead hosts. Of course dead-but-well-preserved wildlife are hard to find, especially in the tropics. As a result, we often rely on less-suitable counts of parasite eggs in fecal samples, which can reveal parasites are present but often precludes identification or comparison across studies. This award will allow us to build on recent work at Brown University, which has brought us tantalizingly close to sparking a new era of genome-enabled parasitology that could overcome these intersecting challenges.

Together with an exciting array of partners - Sloth Conservation Foundation (Costa Rica), The Organization for Tropical Studies (Costa Rica), Fundación Zoológica de Cali (Colombia), and the Instituto de Biología Subtropical (Argentina) - we are embarking on an ambitious plan to document and DNA barcode parasites from tropical wildlife across the Americas.  We are also expanding our work at Brown, tapping into the expertise of tapping into the GeoSpatial expertise of Professor of the Practice Seda Şalap-Ayça and Data Scientist Tim Divoll to build more user-friendly and informative data portals. 

​We are grateful for the new support to build and share this important resource!

This month we are saying farewell to Beth -- who has been the beating heart of our lab community for years -- as she embarks on the next exciting chapter in her career. 

Beth has been awarded a prestigious Prize Fellow to launch her independent research group at the University of Bath in the UK, where she will join a cohort of talented PIs forming a new research cluster focused on the microbiome. Because Beth will be there, it is sure to become an exciting epicenter for excellence in the field. Students and junior researchers who are interested -- take note!

We will all miss Beth, but we take heart in knowing that we can continue to collaborate and learn from her for years to come. What an all-star she is...!!

Graduation is always bitter sweet and we had so many amazing seniors graduate this year -- the class that began under the most trying of circumstances in the early days of the pandemic. A few highlights and congratulations are in order:

• Eliza Atwood: Environmental Studies Senior Prize for Best Senior Thesis! Eliza is heading to UC Irvine for graduate school in conservation!
• Maddy Florida: Senior Prize for Academic Excellence in Biological Sciences!
  
• Logan Torres: Inaugural senior prize at IBES 10th year anniversary!
• Savianna Gonzales-Wagner: Entering Masters program in education at Columbia!

Always inspiring and successful new students bringing their energy to the lab as well:

• Abigail Grove: rising junior wins the BrownConnect SPRINT|UTRA opportunity to join our team at Yellowstone this summer!

Congratulations to Hannah Hoff for being awarded the 2024 James Reveal Eriogonum Project Grant from the Eriogonum Society! Among Hannah's many ambitious endeavors, she is leading the development of a comprehensive plant DNA barcode library and nutritional database so that we can understand what fuels the migrations of large herbivores across Yellowstone. These little buckwheats are turning out to be big contributors, and the grant will help ensure we can account for all of them. We are all so excited to get back out and botanizing in Yellowstone this summer!

The lab has been awarded a Life and Medical Sciences Seed Award from Brown's OVPR for 2024!

This $50,000 award will support improvements in our ability to use DNA barcoding to characterize gastrointestinal nematodes that infect tropical wildlife species. Our own Dr. Ezequiel Vanderhoeven is a world expert in the parasitology of tropical wildlife and the seed award will help us extend our funding base for OneHealth research at the nexus of animal health and ecology.

Leveraging expert-verified data to bring wildlife parasitology into the genomics ageWe are on the cusp of a genomics revolution to usher in an era of precision wildlife parasitology—but achieving it requires reforming long-standing traditions in the field. Biologists and health practitioners need to monitor wildlife to ensure effective conservation and identify emerging infectious diseases that may threaten humans and livestock. But we may often misunderstand host-parasite interactions because we rely on overly simplistic methods to study parasite diversity in nature. Fortunately, emerging molecular and bioinformatic techniques can help overcome traditional limitations. We plan to establish genomic workflows to more precisely characterize the diversity and distribution of gastrointestinal parasites that infect wildlife in tropical hotspots. We will accomplish this by constructing and utilizing one of the largest expert-verified databases of helminth DNA in the world. This database will bridge the gap between today’s ‘gold-standard’ practice of using microscopes to painstakingly identify parasites in the field and tomorrow’s need for ‘field-ready’ methods that provide more cost-effective, accurate, and timely parasite identifications—especially for the practitioners who need these data at the right times and places to take action. We will initially use these emerging tools to map hard-to-identify parasites onto wildlife hosts in tropical forests—sloths, monkeys, and tapirs among others—in ways that are more robust than standard techniques could provide. This exciting venture features interdisciplinary collaboration among veterinarians, parasitologists, molecular biologists, and ecologists. It will provide world-class opportunities for students and researchers at Brown to engage with non-profit organizations that focus on wildlife conservation, health, and human livelihoods.
PI: Tyler Kartzinel, Peggy and Henry D. Sharpe Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, Assistant Professor of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology and the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Congratulations to Elin Videvall for earning a highly competitive SRC Starting Grant to join the faculty and open her lab at Uppsala University! Elin plans to lead projects involving the microbiomes of wildlife in a changing world. Elin joined the lab with a Swedish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2021 and we are so proud to have had a small part in her journey. 

The lab is incredibly excited to welcome Mary Burak! Mary is joining the lab as a Fulbright Scholar based in Kenya followed by an IBES Voss Postdoctoral Fellowship. Together these prestigious awards will support Mary for three years both in Kenya and at Brown. Mary will collaborate with a number of major NGOs as well as scholars at the University of Nairobi, the National Museums of Kenya, and Mpala Research Centre to address critical data needs for the conservation of large carnivores and herbivores across Kenya. 

Mary completed a PhD in Os Schmitz's lab at Yale University in 2023. She is a star and we are so keen to learn from her and collaborate with her over the next few years and beyond!

Congratulations to Beth for having her CRISPR-based barcoding paper published at Molecular Ecology Resources! The paper is available ahead of print on the publisher's website and we will post a PDF to our lab's publications page. Our original summary based on her preprint in June is still available in the text that follows.

Beth just posted a much-anticipated BioRxiv preprint describing our new efforts to repurpose CRISPR technology in ways that might help overcome persistent drawbacks to PCR and other targeted enrichment strategies in molecular ecology (doi: 10.1101/2023.06.30.547247v1). We show that we can obtain highly accurate plant DNA barcodes and assemble entire chloroplast genomes. These advances could help with species identification, discovery, and the construction of DNA reference libraries for use in a variety of applications. Moreover, we show incredible accuracy when it comes to estimating the relative abundance of DNA from a mixture of species compared to typical PCR-based methods for DNA metabarcoding.

We hope the experimental methods will be of interest and that folks working in the field will see the great potential. Once scalable, these advantages could really transform the quality and completeness of many projects that we do in the lab -- and the kinds of project we know a lot of folks are out there trying to do around the world as well!

The approach was noted to be a potentially 'high risk / high reward' of the NSF CAREER award that supported our work. We'll update once it is peer-reviewed and published.

Senior all-star Caroline Dressler won the 2023 Kidwell Prize! This is the top senior prize in our area of biology. Caroline was recognized for outstanding academics, a top-notch Honors thesis, consistent leadership at Brown, and a community-minded commitment to education. It was an honor to contribute to her journey -- we look forward to publishing more papers together and following her journey for years to come. Congrats, Caroline!