Media

NPR’s TED Radio Hour (2020), Futureproof – Vaccinating vampire bats (2020), BBC Science in Action (2020), BYUradio (2019)

“However, even though we cannot predict exactly which virus will emerge next, we can, and should, work to better understand the field of contenders, and in this issue, Mollentze and colleagues describe a new tool for doing just this. Using machine learning models, they present an approach for prioritizing novel viruses for further characterization based solely on compositional signatures present within viral genomes”

Cara Brook wrote a News and Views on our 2019 Nature Ecology and Evolution paper demonstrating the viability of using spreadable vaccines to control vampire bat rabies 

“Bakker et al. present convincing, empirically validated evidence supporting spreadable vaccines as a viable and more effective intervention strategy to combat vampire bat rabies than has been previously offered by culling. As the authors acknowledge, source–sink metapopulation dynamics may complicate transmission patterns beyond those explored in their paper — though stochastic extinctions generated in small populations are more likely to favour rabies extirpation than to antagonize it.”

Nature published a Research Highlight covering our latest in Proceedings B, and first of hopefully many papers on rabies in Costa Rica. 

“These findings and other results suggest that variants of bat rabies virus flow between North America and South America through Central America. Because bats — and therefore the virus — often move into Costa Rica from other nations, the country’s sporadic culling of bats is unlikely to control the disease…”

Mark Woolhouse wrote a Perspective in Science on our 2018 Science paper showing how machine learning can be used to predict the animal origins of viruses based on their genome sequences.