One needs only read the original Nature paper, and a simple knowledge of the
nature of academic research to understand why it might take 5 years for such a
"simple and obvious" experiment to be conducted. Let's consider several points:
1) To obtain grant funding to conduct such an experiment, it takes a certain
amount of time for funding agencies to decide that they will even offer the
chance for investigators to compete for the funds. One need only think about
how long it took the NIH to decide that research funds should be allocated to
investigate HIV/AIDS to realize that the few years that it took for funds to be
made available to study this fungal scourge in bats was expedited. So it's
probably safe to assume it took at least one year for agencies to announce they
had funds available for such research.
2) Once the announcement of funds is made publicly available, then there is a
deadline announced (typically 6-12 months in advance) for receipt of the grant
application. This gives investigators the time to write the grant. Do not think
that this is time wasted; in fact, the process of grant writing is an important
one, as it gives the investigator the time to think hard about what is the best
experiment(s) to conduct to answer the research question. The investigator
needs to provide evidence that the proposed work can be carried out in the
proposed time frame; this includes evidence of support from the institution (do
you have the space to house bats for an extended amount of time, and will they
be housed and treated in a humane way?) and confirmation from expert
collaborators.
3) Once the grants are received, it takes time to review the grants before the
money can be awarded. Depending upon the agency, this can take an additional 6
months to one year.
4) So now, after 2-3 years, you have your money to conduct the experiment. The
proposed experiment will take 102 days, but that is just considering the amount
of time needed to keep the infected bats. Factor in an additional 3-6 months
prior to receiving the bats to get the lab ready to house the animals and
conduct the research on them. Remember, any research that uses animals takes a
LOT more money, time and institutional oversight than ordinary lab research.
5) Now that the 102 days of bat infection is finished, we still have a lot of
data that needs to be analyzed and a paper needs to be written. Since there are
a lot of collaborators (I count eleven authors on the paper from nine different
institutions, both academic and governmental) this may take longer than you
would think--everyone is juggling multiple projects, so getting data together
for one paper is a bit like herding cats. Of course, the opportunity to publish
in a prestigious journal such as Nature tends to focus the efforts of most
people on this task, but still...drafts of the paper need to be distributed to
all eleven people, and everyone needs to have their say in the content of the
paper. While this process takes a long time, in my experience it always results
in a much improved version of the manuscript. Let's say this process took 6
months.
6) The paper is then submitted to the journal, and the editor assigned to the
paper needs to decide whether it's worthy to send out for peer review.
Depending upon the editor, this process could be short (less than a week) or
not so short (several weeks). Hurrah, it's going to be sent out for peer
review! Now the authors wait to see if 3 anonymous (to the authors, not to the
editor) experts in the field decide that their work should be published in the
journal. After 1-2 months, the word comes back from the editor--the reviewers
liked the paper, but they think there could be some improvements. Here are
their suggestions, which could be minor ones (changes in figures, wording of
certain sections, include some additional references) or major (you need to
conduct a few more experiments or improved data analysis). The corrections
could take as little as a few days, or several months.
7) The authors submit the revised paper back to the journal. Now there is a
span of several weeks before the page proofs are returned. This is the last
chance the authors have to locate any mistakes (typically spelling and
formatting problems). Once the page proofs are accepted, then there may be a
span of a week or two before the paper appears on the Nature web site, and an
additional span of 2-6 weeks before it appears in print. This paper is now on
the web site, but not yet available in the printed journal that appears in your
local institutional library.
So I'm not at all surprised that it might take 5 years for this work to be
published. I am surprised that the subject line to this thread reads "Study
'confirms' Geomyces..."--why the quote around the word "confirms"? According to
Koch's postulates*, the confirmation is in this Nature paper, with the caveat
that the bats need to be hibernating (and thus have an altered immune response)
for the fungus to really be destructive.
If you would like to receive a copy of this paper, email me and I'll forward it
to you.
FYI: the institutions represented by the authors of this paper are: Molecular
and Environmental Toxicology Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison,
Wisconsin; National Wildlife Health Center, US Geological Survey, Madison,
Wisconsin; Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, Madison, Wisconsin;
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee,
Knoxville, Tennessee; Fort Collins Science Center, US Geological Survey, Fort
Collins, Colorado; New York Department of Environmental Conservation, Albany,
New York; US Fish and Wildlife Service, Hadley, Massachusetts; Wisconsin
Department of Natural Resources, Madison, Wisconsin; Department of Biology,
Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Diana
*Koch's postulates are:
• The microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms
suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms.
• The microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown
in pure culture.
• The cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into
a healthy organism.
• The microorganism must be reisolated from the inoculated, diseased
experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific
causative agent.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Diana R. Tomchick
Professor
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Department of Biochemistry
5323 Harry Hines Blvd.
Rm. ND10.214B
Dallas, TX 75390-8816, U.S.A.
Email: [email protected]
214-645-6383 (phone)
214-645-6353 (fax)
On Oct 26, 2011, at 11:34 PM, <[email protected]>
wrote:
> While it is good news to finally know the cause behind WNS, I have to wonder
> why it took 5 years and several million dollars for someone to finally
> conduct such a simple and obvious experiment to definitively prove G.
> destructans as the culprit.
>
> Jerry.
>
> In a message dated 10/26/2011 8:36:42 P.M. Central Daylight Time,
> [email protected] writes:
> http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111026/full/news.2011.613.html
>
> Culprit behind bat scourge confirmed
>
> A cold-loving fungus is behind an epidemic decimating bat populations
> in North America.
>
> By: Susan Young
>
> Researchers have confirmed that a recently identified fungus is
> responsible for white-nose syndrome, a deadly disease that is sweeping
> through bat colonies in eastern North America.
>
> The fungus, Geomyces destructans, infects the skin of hibernating
> bats, causing lesions on the animals' wings and a fluffy white
> outgrowth on the muzzle. When white-nose syndrome takes hold of a
> hibernating colony, more than 90% of the bats can die (see Disease
> epidemic killing only US bats). The disease was first documented in
> February 2006 in a cave in New York, and has spread to at least 16
> other US states and four Canadian provinces.
>
> The culpability of G. destructans for this sudden outbreak was thrown
> into question when the fungus was found on healthy bats in Europe,
> where it is not associated with the grim mortality levels seen in
> North America1. Some proposed that the fungus was not the primary
> cause of the catastrophic die offs, and that another factor — such as
> an undetected virus — must be to blame. But a study published today in
> Nature2 reveals that G. destructans is indeed guilty.
>
> "The fungus alone is sufficient to recreate all the pathology
> diagnostic for the disease," says David Blehert, a microbiologist at
> the National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and senior
> author on the report.
> Bat-to-bat spread
>
> Blehert and his colleagues collected healthy little brown bats (Myotis
> lucifugus) from Wisconsin, which is well beyond the known range of
> white-nose syndrome. They infected the bats by direct administration
> of G. destructans spores to the skin or by contact with infected bats
> from New York. By the end of the 102-day experiment, the tell-tale
> white fungus was growing on the muzzles and wings of all of the
> directly infected Wisconsin bats and 16 of the 18 exposed to sick
> bats.
>
> This is the first experimental evidence that white-nose syndrome can
> be passed from bat to bat, and is very worrying from a conservation
> point of view because bats huddle together in large numbers in caves
> and mate in large swarms, says Emma Teeling, a bat biologist at
> University College Dublin in Ireland. "If a bat has this fungus on
> them, it's going to spread quickly throughout the population," says
> Teeling, who was not involved with the study. "It's like a perfect
> storm."
>
> The infected Wisconsin bats did not die during the experiment, which
> may be due to the limited timeline of infection, the authors suggest.
> Although the study does not directly show that a healthy bat will die
> from infection with G. destructans, the results did show that the
> fungus alone was sufficient to cause lesions diagnostic of white-nose
> syndrome to form on previously healthy bats, indicating that the
> fungus is the cause of the deaths so often associated with white-nose
> syndrome in the wild.
>
> To stop a scourge
>
> Since it first appeared, white-nose syndrome has behaved like a novel
> pathogen spreading from a single origin through a naive population,
> says Jonathan Sleeman, director of the National Wildlife Health
> Center, who was not involved in the study. Proof that G. destructans
> is the primary cause of white-nose syndrome will "help us focus our
> actions or management efforts into the future", he says.
>
> Although little can be done to control the spread of the disease
> through bat-to-bat transmission, the US Fish and Wildlife Service
> (FWS) has asked people to stay out of caves in and near affected
> areas, and has closed some caves on agency-managed land.
>
> On 21 October, the FWS announced that up to $1 million in funding will
> be made available for research on white-nose syndrome. Projects
> covering topics such as how the fungus proliferates within caves and
> mines, and the potential for biological means or environmental
> manipulations to improve bat survival, are among the service's top
> priorities.
>
> *
> References
> 1. Puechmaille, S. J. et al. Trends Ecol. Evol. 26, 570-576 (2011).
> 2. Lorch, J. M. et al. Nature doi:10.1038/nature10590 (2011).
>
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