Microbiology, Immunology, and Pathology

Dr. Schountz’s lab of the Center of Vector-Borne Infectious Diseases (CVID) is interested in understanding immune responses of bats to bat-borne human pathogenic viruses that typically lead to apathogenic, persistent infections in the bats. Current areas of interest are the recently-discovered HL18NL11 bat influenza A virus, coronaviruses (MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2), Nipah virus and ebolaviruses. Most work in the lab focuses on bat-borne viruses using a unique breeding colony of Jamaican fruit bats as an animal model.

Active projects are funded by NIAID and DARPA to develop a better understanding as to why bats host such high impact human pathogens that cause no discernible disease in bats. Bats have a number of seemingly unusual immunological features about them, including constitutive activation of the type I interferon pathway, little evidence of inflammatory responses, an extremely large number of immunoglobulin VDJ germline segments (11x larger than humans), and little evidence of somatic hypermutation. These unusual features have undoubtably shaped the genomes of bat viruses, and it may be that they also contribute to the highly pathogenic nature of bat-borne viruses in humans.