Museum Links Evolutionary Biology and Human Health

Wednesday, June 09 6:22 pm

What does Darwin have to do with human disease? Quite a lot, it turns out, as the lessons of evolution, enhanced by sophisticated technologies such as gene sequencing, are being used to tease out the secrets of organisms that spread death and disability around the globe.

The American Museum of Natural History has taken a leading role in these efforts through ongoing collaborations between its evolutionary biologists and medical researchers to understand various threats to human health, from flu pandemics to malaria to the ravages of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

This work was highlighted at a Science Breakfast panel discussion held last week at the Museum before an audience of medical and science writers.

Listen to the Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes (1 hr 09 mins, 64 MB)

The panel included three curators from the Museum’s Division of Invertebrate Zoology who work under the auspices of the Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics. Rob DeSalle, who moderated, Mark Siddall, and Ward Wheeler were joined by three medical scientists: New York University School of Medicine’s Jane Carlton, Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Robert Burk, and Columbia University’s Paul Planet.

Museum scientists help medical researchers pin down the origin, evolution, and diversity of pathogens, and, perhaps most important, how they have adapted to us and we to them.

“Every doctor, whether they know it or not, is a natural historian,” said Planet, who studies infectious diseases in children and is also a research associate at the Museum.

Another key component of collaboration is the development of new tools to make sense of masses of raw data. Case in point: the Supramap, displayed by Wheeler, a powerful new computer application which allows researchers and public health officials to track the spread and mutation of a disease over time and place.

Of course, the ultimate goal of such supercomputing, genome-sequencing, and the building of evolutionary trees is to better predict pandemic outbreaks and to find better treatments, even cures.

Said Burk, who has worked with DeSalle on the molecular phylogeny of the human papillomavirus, which is linked to cervical cancer, for a decade:  ”From the medical perspective, I think it’s very clear that the better we understand the pathogenesis of any disease, the better we are able to intervene.”

Tracking Pathogens in Real Time to Stop Outbreaks

Monday, April 12 11:01 am

Supramap, a powerful new web-based application that tracks pathogens in time and space as they evolve, can help public health officials and national security experts predict and respond to outbreaks of infectious diseases. The program was officially announced in a paper in Cladistics.

“This tool has a lot of predictive power,” says Ward Wheeler, curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum. “If the movement of a pathogen is related to bird flyways, for example, and those routes are shifting because of something like climate change, we can predict where the disease might logically emerge next.”

Operating on parallel programming on high-performance computing systems at Ohio State University and the Ohio Supercomputer Center, Supramap allows any user to input raw genetic sequences of a pathogen’s strains and build an evolutionary tree based on mutations. The branches are projected onto the globe with pop-up windows to show how strains mutate over space and time and infect new hosts.

Supramap depicting the westward spread of avian influenza (H5N1). Red tree branches indicate a genotype of lysine (K) at amino acid position 627 in the PB2 protein, which confers increase replication in mammals. White tree branches indicate a genotype of glutamic acid (E), the wild type for H5N1. Mutations at each node can be viewed in pop-up windows. From Janies et al. 2010 Cladistics online 04-9-10

In the research paper, Wheeler and colleagues test Supramap’s capability on recent strains of avian influenza (H5N1). The evolutionary tree (see the image), based on 239 sequences of a specific gene, polymerase basic 2, shows that host shifts are highly correlated with a specific gene mutation that allows avian viruses to adapt to mammalian hosts.

“We package the tools in an easy-to-use web-based application so that you don’t need a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology and computer science to understand the trajectory and transmission of a disease,” says Daniel A. Janies, first author of the paper and an associate professor at Ohio State University.