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Diseases that can be passed from animals to humans are called zoonotic diseases and disease of this type is often the most difficult to contain and treat. Diseases such as the viruses  SARS, MERS, Rabies, Ebola and Marburg are all passed from animals to humans and there are many many more.

As human populations expand into areas we have never lived before we have more and more contact with animals and so there is more risk that disease will spread from animals to people. In recent years there have been several serious outbreaks of dangerous viruses that we now know most likely originated in bats. Among these diseases have been SARS, MERS, Nipah virus and Hendra virus and these outbreaks have shown us that we have very little information on how common these viruses are in bats and how often they can spread from bats to humans.

My work is focused on these diseases that spread from bats to humans, to investigate this I study how the viruses interact  it with cells to try to determine what it is that allows these viruses to “jump” from bats to humans. In addition I work with other groups to gather samples from wild bat populations to investigate the types of viruses that are common in bats and how easy it is for these diseases to pass from bat to bat and bats to other animals. I hope that this information will allow us to predict and ideally avoid future outbreaks of viruses.

I normally start the day by examining each of my cell cultures under the microscope, these are grown in petri dishes in incubators and it is important that I have healthy cells ready when I need to do an experiment. After this it depends on what I have to do that day sometimes I will work on my computer mostly looking at the genes of a virus and comparing it to other related viruses, this is a key way to pick out the potential parts of a virus that make it dangerous to humans.

Other days I will take what I have learned from the computer work and try to experiment in the lab to see if i have identified parts of a virus that could be useful to create new drugs. It is for this stage that I need cells as I need to see how a virus affects healthy cells, for this reason I often have lots of cells from a number of different sources some are human some are from other animals. I use viruses that have been altered so they cannot reproduce (make more virus) this means that they are much safer, I also insert a new gene into them so that when they infect a cell they make it glow green!