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.

Brave New World

Fig.1. Cannabis sativa. (Credit: Biodiversity Heritage Library)

In a laboratory, just outside downtown Portland, Mowgli Holmes and his team at Phylos Bioscience are embarking on a brave new world.

“We’re creating the first genetically defined collection that has ever been,” he said. “... We know less about it than any other crop.”

That crop Holmes is referring to is cannabis, and that collection he and his team of genetic researchers have been working on the past couple of years is an extensive genomic dataset. Holmes and his group will expand upon the "draft" genomics work previously done.

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).