At night in a Ugandan forest, a team of American and African scientists take oral swabs from insect-eating cyclops leaf-nosed bats.
At night in a Ugandan forest, a team of American and African scientists take oral swabs from insect-eating cyclops leaf-nosed bats.
In a necropsy room near the Baltic Sea, researchers try to determine what killed a donkey, a Bennett’s tree-kangaroo and a capybara at a German zoo — all of them suffering from severe brain swelling.
Neither team was aware of the other, yet they were both about to converge on a discovery that would forever link them — and help solve a long-enduring mystery. They were each about to find two new relatives of the rubella virus, which had been, since it was first identified in 1962, the only known member of its virus family, Matonaviridae.
Read more at: University of Wisconsin-Madison
Andrew Bennett, a former graduate student in the lab of Tony Goldberg, UW-Madison Professor of Epidemiology in the School of Veterinary Medicine, holds a cyclops leaf-nosed bat during field work in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, in search of viruses carried by the animals. Bennett was part of an international team that just described the first two relatives of rubella virus ever found. (Photo Credit: Emily Julka)
