Tim Cernak isn’t looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Many recent examples, including habitat loss and rising global temperatures, point to declining ecosystem health with broad implications for human health, so it’s hard not to see the planet as being on a precipice. But he believes we can still do something about it by making necessary, rapid changes.
“We’re living in a mass extinction event,” says Cernak, associate professor of chemistry and medicinal chemistry. The words carry a sense of urgency, like when COVID-19 began to wreak havoc around the world and we were told to stay home, or when we learned that microplastics weren’t only all around us, but in our bloodstreams damaging our cells.
However, the fate of any particular species isn’t sealed, including our own. Cernak’s words are actually accompanied by something unexpected: a glimmer of hope.
“We wondered in March 2020 if COVID-19 would be an existential moment for our species, but we broke the mold with how quickly we could create a vaccine. What used to take 10 years took eight months,” Cernak says. “I imagine a future where we could treat any species. Where we could make medicines quickly, not just for humans—a future using tools from the frontlines of medicine to tackle any wildlife disease and prevent future pandemics at the same time.”
And Cernak isn’t the only one working to create better days ahead, for humans and Earth’s critters alike. LSA professor Regina Baucom, a plant adaptation and evolution researcher in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB), studies ways in which both Midwest farmers and pollinators can thrive, assuring sustainable food production for centuries to come.
“To contribute new knowledge to the field of sustainable agriculture and stop the rapid decline of our pollinators, who are responsible for pollinating nearly 80 percent of all flowering plants … that’s the goal,” says Baucom.
Now, thanks in part to LSA’s Meet the Moment Research Initiative grants—which support projects that showcase how the liberal arts and sciences address the most pressing generational challenges—Cernak, Baucom, and their fellow researchers are working toward a better future.
Cernak and EEB professors Timothy James, as well as researcher Kelly Speer, have been seeking a new drug to thwart the rapid decline of frog and bat populations that are plagued by two fungi: Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis and Pseudogymnoascus destructans. In frogs, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis has led to global extinctions of several subspecies. In bats, Pseudogymnoascus destructans has given rise to white-nose syndrome, putting previously common bats, like the little brown bat, at risk of extinction.
Like many animals, frogs and bats have a profound impact on biodiversity, the economy, human health, and society as a whole. Frogs, for example, help control mosquito populations, which are vectors for human disease, and grow to play an important role in the food chain as predator and prey. Similarly, bats are seed dispersers and pollinators, as well as partners in maintaining healthy ecosystems by managing insects that damage agricultural crops.
Both of these fungi have been around for a long time; why is it a problem now, specifically for frogs? That’s what James wants to understand.
“We can see today [that] we’ve failed to mitigate these outbreaks because we lacked the basic understanding of these diseases. Without basic understanding, we can’t put policy in place that would stop this, so diseases continue to spread quickly,” says James, an expert in amphibian health and fungi curator at LSA’s Research Museums Center. “With frogs in captivity, we can treat them with an antifungal—but, despite their efficacy, there are bad side effects. For bats, biological solutions haven’t worked at all.”
Speer recently finished her term as director of the Michigan Pathogen Biorepository and assistant professor in EEB. Like James, she is interested in why these fungal infections are a problem now, particularly in bats. “Bats are a model system for being able to tolerate or resist infections,” she says. “Viral and bacterial infections that prove fatal in other mammals don’t demonstrate the same outcome in bats. However, they’re susceptible to this fungus.”
The team has access to the Michigan Pathogen Biorepository’s high-quality, wildlife-associated parasite and pathogen specimens. Here, researchers can study host-fungus interactions using genetics, creating a bridge between biodiversity science and public health, in which James and Cernak specialize, respectively.“
It’s the classic operation in medicine, where researchers are interfaced at the hospital and patients’ tissue samples can be gene sequenced to fully understand their tumor or condition. Then, we can match it to a drug, or we begin creating a new one,” says Cernak, also a member of U-M’s Center for Global Health Equity.
By using U-M’s Drug Repurposing Library and the Michigan Pathogen Biorepository, the team has access to myriad clinical compounds and disease strains. This allows Cernak to plug wildlife medicine research into the modern drug discovery workflow, as if it were coming from a human hospital.“
I’m looking forward to bringing my background in pharmacokinetics to conservation work. I can try to understand how a possible antifungal treatment distributes in a frog or bat’s tissues and eventually exits the body. We don’t want to over- or underdose. But frogs and bats are different from humans. They don’t take their pill with breakfast every morning, and they live in different environments and are different sizes,” says Cernak. “But pushing dosing models into a new dimension is scientifically exciting.”
James remembers where his idea for how to handle the frogs came to him: a Brookstone store at the mall. “They had an African dwarf frog in one of their Frog-O-Sphere kits, which is a small, plastic tank. It may not be the most ideal system for the frog, but it was clear to me that this frog could be small, strong, fully aquatic, and susceptible to the fungus we’re interested in. This frog is related to the African clawed frog, and I thought that would be the perfect species for us to take and develop a model, an improved one, to understand the fungus and frog better.”
Now, James has been able to observe these frogs in a healthy aquarium habitat and understand the best ways to take care of them while studying the complicated life cycle of the fungus. However, creating a similar process to study bats presents different challenges.
“It’s harder to maintain bats because they require larger enclosures and many species live in large colonies, so we have to explore other options to study them,” says Speer. Creative solutions, including genome sequencing and enlisting the help of Ann Arbor residents, may provide a way to learn about bats while keeping them in their natural habitat.
Bat1K, a global initiative to sequence the entire genome of all living bat species, gives researchers hope that they can use the genetic information to understand why bats are so susceptible to fungal pathogens at a cellular level. It’s a long-term goal. In the meantime, researchers will focus on testing the efficacy of antifungal application to bat condos in the lab, eventually recruiting the help of the community to install antifungal bat houses outside their homes. However, the first and most critical step is identifying a drug that is safe and effective.
—EEB Prof. Regina Baucom
—EEB Prof. Elizabeth Tibbetts
“Museum collections don’t often have opportunities to implement real-world conservation and pandemic strategies, even if we have the knowledge of how to do it, so getting to engage in this project offers us an exciting opportunity,” says Speer.
In partnership with Brian Gratwicke from the Smithsonian National Zoo and other organizations, including Bat Conservation International and the Bat Biology Foundation, LSA’s research team will consult with leading experts in fungal, pharmaceutical, ecological, bat, and frog research to ensure working with the different live species can be done in the most ethical and effective way.
Another LSA-led research team implementing real-world conservation strategies is the one led by Baucom, and the group is committed to better understanding how the herbicide dicamba affects pollinator survival and the quality of food provided by plants in major field crops on Midwestern farms.
The group seeks to answer questions such as: Does direct exposure to dicamba affect pollinator survival? How does dicamba drift alter the quality and abundance of pollen and nectar that weedy plants in agricultural margins provide? Where in the state of Michigan and the Midwest are farmers using this herbicide, and can we mitigate its consequences on the pollinating community?
“A world without pollinators is a world without apples, chocolate, and even coffee,” says Baucom. “This research comes at a critical time when Midwest farmers have begun using the herbicide dicamba, which drifts and pollutes natural communities that provide shelter and nourishment to these important species.”
The knowledge gap related to the effects of herbicide is shocking, especially because 73 percent of the 408 million tons of pesticide applied yearly in the United States are some form of herbicide, Baucom says. Baucom’s team consists of EEB professors Elizabeth Tibbetts and Luis Zaman; David Sherman, a Hans W. Vahlteich Professor of Medicinal Chemistry and professor of chemistry; and colleagues from other parts of the university.
Humans and the planet rely on pollinating insects. Bee species, wasps, and flies, are responsible for 75 percent of the food species we consume and up to 10 percent of the overall global food production. Additionally, access to safe, nutritious food is an environmental justice issue, and it’s heavily relevant to Michigan, where the southern portion of the state is dominated by agriculture.
Tibbetts, who studies wasps and their sophisticated social interactions, began conducting field work on plants and pollinators at U-M’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens with Baucom over the summer. After finding out which weeds appear to be resistant to dicamba and if exposure to the herbicide affects pollinator behavior via experiment and control groups, the duo created curated prairie strips of healthy species that will also help nourish pollinators. The prairie strips, if effective, could be installed at farms all over the Midwest to help farmers maintain areas of their land.
And with the help of Sherman, Baucom and Tibbetts’s research findings can be translated into critical action.
Sherman, also a professor of microbiology and immunology and research professor at U-M’s Life Sciences Institute, has been working in the field of natural products for more than 20 years, using new microorganisms obtained from environmental samples he has collected and seeing “what happens in a petri dish, what bioactive natural molecules the organisms produce,” he says. These molecules are well known in the pharmaceutical industry because of how they can cure and control certain diseases, like the chemotherapy drug Taxol, or bacteria-derived tetracycline and erythromycin antibiotics.
“The blueprint for these naturally occurring molecules is encoded in the microorganism’s DNA. Each new microorganism we isolate has the instructions to potentially create more than 100 molecules. The goal in my lab is to understand how these microorganisms make these complex molecular structures,” says Sherman.
Baucom and Tibbetts’s work gives Sherman a chance to study the bee microbiome and chemically profile a small sample of bees, their nectar, and dicamba using mass-spectrometry, which could lead to the discovery of new microorganisms on the bee’s surface and in the gut.
“I want to know how their microbiome changes, by comparing the bees, nectar, and pollen between those that have been exposed to the herbicide and those that haven’t,” he explains. “What microorganisms are missing? Do the bees get sick when they lose them? What new ones appear? Do they provide any protective or medicinal properties?”
Later, the team’s research will be used to conduct community outreach to further their impact and inspire generational change.
Baucom and Tibbetts plan to integrate students as interns in their studies and to collaborate with high school teachers to develop lesson plans about the importance of pollinators and environmental science more broadly. Zaman will develop a mitigation strategy using ecological modeling and machine learning to figure out the best combination of species for farmers to use in prairie mixes. Jennifer Blesh at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability and Noah Webster at the U-M Institute for Social Research will conduct social surveys and interviews to understand where dicamba is being used and the likelihood that the farming community would use the prairie strips.
“It wasn’t too long ago that your windshield would be splattered with bugs when driving on the highway. Maybe it’s convenient now that this is no longer the case, but we want people to wonder why,” says Tibbetts. “We can’t just want to save pollinators—we need to. Our lives depend on it.”
Learn about supporting the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
With her words and images, LSA alum Supriya Kelkar brings a fresh voice to children’s literature and inspires readers “to decolonize, to hold their heads high, and to never forget their shine.”
Rosario (Rosie) Ceballo began a five-year term as dean of LSA in August, drawn back to U-M by “the incredible caliber of the people who are part of the LSA community.”
It’s easy to get caught up in doom and gloom, but glimmers of hope abound. LSA alums, faculty, students, and staff are creating positive change in the lives of people, animals, and the planet.
A bright future shouldn’t be limited by financial barriers. LSA is committed to making it possible for every admitted student to afford an education here. Donor support helps create access while supporting tomorrow’s leaders, thinkers, and doers in their hopes to make a difference in our world.
| Release Date: | 11/12/2024 |
|---|---|
| Category: | Faculty; Research |
| Tags: | LSA; Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Chemistry; Natural Sciences; LSA Magazine; Jordyn Imhoff |
