OSU team wins prize for idea to fight bat disease

Published 12:45 am Sunday, November 15, 2020

Oregon State University researchers and a California professor teamed up to win a national contest sponsored by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, proposing to develop a spray to slow the growth of a fungus that causes white-nose syndrome in bats.

The team intends to use the $20,000 prize to continue work on an aerosol spray to silence the genetics that allow the fungus to grow, said OSU graduate student Emily Dziedzic.

“We’re really excited about it. It’s really exciting technology,” she said Thursday. “It (the contest) was a great chance to brainstorm and lay the groundwork for building on the idea in the future.”

The fungus, Pseudogymnoascus destructans, attacks hibernating bats, damaging their wings and causing them to leave hibernation too soon, leading to starvation.

Millions of bats have died from white-nose syndrome since it was first detected in the U.S. in 2006 in New York. The disease spread to other states and leaped from Nebraska to Washington in 2016.

Bats benefit agriculture by controlling the population of night-flying insects.

USFWS held the contest to spur research on killing the fungus without harming hibernating bats. The federal agency received 47 entries.

The winning entry was submitted by Dziedzic, OSU professor Taal Levi, OSU professor Jared LeBoldus, UC-Santa Cruz professor Marm Kilpatrick, OSU post-doctoral researcher Jenny Urbina Gonzalez and OSU graduate student Michael Gordon.

“White-nose syndrome is devastating native bat populations at unprecedented rates and this proposed solution from the Oregon State University and University of California team may be just the catalyst we need to give bats across North America a better chance at survival,” USFWS Director Aurelia Skipwith said in a statement.

The goal will be to develop a spray that suppresses the growth of the fungus on the bats, Dziedzic said. “It’s harmless to the bats,” she said.

Dziedzic said the bat-killing disease motivated her to become a scientist.

“I’m a fan of bats. I think bats are amazing,” she said.— Bulletin wire report