On the hunt for new viruses, this bat-trapping scientist hopes to prevent future pandemics

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Supaporn Wacharapluesadee—one of the world’s most accomplished virus hunters—says wildlife surveillance is as important as testing people and livestock to understand new viral threats. LongReads

Rhinolophus acuminatus

On 9 January—the day before Chinese researchers first publicly reported SARS-CoV-2’s genome—Supaporn discovered the genetic signature of a novel virus in that Wuhan visitor, becoming the first scientist outside China to do so. A database search showed the new virus was closest to a coronavirus in Chinese bats that Daszak and Shi had reported in 2017. “Ten years ago, no one thought bats were important—we thought only about influenza,” Rome says. “But Supaporn was very keen to do a lot with bats.

With nets in hand, a team rides down a road that abuts a reservoir in Thailand’s Khao Ang Rue Nai Wildlife Sanctuary to a water pipe inhabited byOn the trip this January, Supaporn returned to the sanctuary in search of closer matches. RacCS203, unlike the virus from Laos, does not infect by binding to the human cellular receptor favored by SARS-CoV-2.

A half-dozen men, who also donned rubber boots and mining headlamps, left the lab and went down an adjacent road to the water pipe, home to a few hundred. The group scuttled down a ladder to the pipe’s opening. Butterfly nets in hand, they hunched into the tunnel, where the stench of bat feces, urine, and wet fur parked in the nose. A mesh placed over the pipe’s opening caught any bats trying to leave the roost.bats. Some sampled in June 2020 harbored a SARS-CoV-2 relative.

 

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DavidQuammen It's really important how this microorganisms lay down in the nature

robertson_lab 'Another foray, a March 2021 expedition to a cave west of Bangkok, yielded two new SARS-CoV-2–related coronaviruses in a species of Rhinolophus called R. pusillus.'

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