Scientific Collections vs. Pandemics: an unfair match?

Fig. 1. Ebola Signs and Symptoms.

Editor’s Note: SciColl held our first community workshop on Emerging Infectious Diseases in October 2014. This October we're posting several pieces that highlight the important work where collections continue to play an integral role.

Editor’s Note: SciColl intern, Ebubechi Okpalugo from Pembroke College, contributed this article as part of her time in the SciColl office during Summer 2017.

Sweeping across three countries and claiming over 11,000 lives, the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak is almost impossible to forget. First identified in 1976, in a remote village named Zaire in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, there have been multiple outbreaks of the virus since. But the 2014 pandemic, caused by the Zaire strain, has been the most deadly. Striking on the border of three of the poorest African nations, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, the virus spread to an unprecedented scale. Liberia, the worst hit, was not officially declared Ebola-free until the 13^th of January 2016.

Could it have been stopped quicker? That’s where scientific collections come in.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: July 25

(Credit: The National Geographic Society) 

#NationalParkService #NPS #centennial #maps #collection

The Archaeogenomics Equation

What do you get when you mix archaeology, ecology, wildlife management, and conservation genomics? No, this isn’t a tagline similar to a duck-in-a-bar joke. What you have is an emerging field of studying called conservation archaeogenomics.

At the forefront of this work are Robert Fleischer and Jesús Maldonado, both of the Center for Conservation Genomics (CCG) at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and National Zoo. The purpose of archaeogenomics is to use genomic methods to learn how humans impacted the environment over time, and Fleischer and Maldonado use this information to make recommendations for conservation.

SciColl presentations at SPNHC and GGBN

We were pleased to attend the SPNHC and GGBN meetings last week in Berlin. We look forward to continuing the conversations with our many colleagues and other collections champions!

If you weren’t able to attend SPNHC, those sessions were recorded. Find them all on iDigBio’s site. David presented in the Collections for the Future session on Thursday afternoon and Eileen presented in the second DemoCamp session on Friday morning.

Our GGBN talks weren’t recorded, but we’ve uploaded the slides for David’s Thematic, Demand-driven Sampling: Economics of Three Strategies, his presentation for GGBN, and Scientific Collections, Food Security and Emerging Infectious Diseases, which he presented at SPNHC.  Eileen’s A Global Registry of Scientific Collections: Striking a Balance Between Disciplinary Detail and Interdisciplinary Discoverability presentation are also uploaded. They can also be found in GGBN’s document library. (If you would like an account, send a request to: library@ggbn.org).

Monday Morning Coffee Break: June 27

(Credit: Reuters/Dado Ruvic) 

#collections #restoration #artifacts #archaeology

Monday Morning Coffee Break: June 6

(Credit: Instagram/Paris Museés/Audrey Pirault) 

#Instagram #livingart #artcollection #collection #ParisMuseum

In the News: NSF Funding Back on Track

Fig.1. Research on migration, disease, and agriculture depend on a sound collections infrastructure
 (Credit left to right: Joi Ito/2008 pic. cropped, Paul Fürst/1656, Marie Hale/2010)

A critically important source of funding for collections in the United States has been reinstated. Though the program is still under evaluation, this money will go towards the preservation of specimens and infrastructure. This week in the news, we read about this program, as well as research projects underway around the world that depend on collections to further understand human disease, migration, and agriculture.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: May 23

(Credit: Jean Livet and 2007 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition®) 

#livingcollections #citrus #humanmigration #emergingdisease

Monday Morning Coffee Break: April 4

(Credit: Lynn Johnson/National Geographic Creative) 

#collections #cannabis #genomics #genome #DNA #ancientDNA

The Assassin (Flies) of Entomology

Editor's Note: This is the second in a series of videos we will release in 2016 about the use of scientific collections and DNA technology.

Torsten Dikow has traveled around the world to find the perfect fit. And he seems to have found it at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH).

Monday Morning Coffee Break: March 28

(Credit: Andrew Warren) 

#newspecies #collections #climatechange #Oeneistanana

Monday Morning Coffee Break: Leap Day Edition

(Credit: Christine Bolaños) 

#fossil #dinosaurs #Trex #GenesisExhibit

Monday Morning Coffee Break: Nov. 23

(Credit: John Baker, Oxford) 

#naturalhistory #collections #nathist #naturalhistorycollections #specimens #misidentification

Teosinte Today, Maize Tomorrow

Fig.1. This photo, published in 1919, shows the stages between a simple spike of Euchlaena mexicana and an ear of maize. (Credit: Journal of Agriculture)

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, associate professor and section chair of the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of California at Davis, and his team study maize and teosinte evolution. Researchers and post-docs - with backgrounds in plant biology and population biology and integrated genetics and genomics - focus on various research areas, such as genetics and genomics, how human and environmental factors have affected the adaptation and domestication of crops and more.

“Domestication (of the crop) has always struck me as a really exciting story because it’s a case where the evolution of the plant was directed by, or affected by, humans,” Ross-Ibarra said about how he became interested in maize and teosinte research.

Monday Morning Coffee Break: Nov. 9

(Credit: Cook, et al., Science Advances (2015)) 

#environmentalchange #climatechange #drought #collections #historicalrecords

The woman with the (specimen) solution

Gunter

After nearly three decades with the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, Elaine Gunter was looking for a change. Since 1978, her role in the central laboratory for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey included designing specimen collections for various field studies, managing personnel, and developing assays.

In 2001, she was promoted to a the deputy director position of the Division of Laboratory Sciences at CDC. While working in the management and operations realm, she found she was dealing with the “suits” of Washington, D.C., who were trying to run science agencies as a business.

That’s when she took the leap.