ABSTRACT
The sporting world in a post COVID-19 environment will undergo meaningful changes to many aspects of its existence over the next few years. Structural changes to the sport, fan interaction, fan identity, economic impacts on the local communities, and various changes to the physical landscape, are all issues we are likely to see after sporting leagues resume "normal” operations. This chapter seeks to examine how the COVID-19 virus will impact sports from a geographic perspective. What does an overall structural change to a sport mean for local communities' economy and neighborhood identity? This project will offer a better understanding of the social, racial justice, and economic impacts felt at the local level by examining the English Premier league and NASCAR as barometers. This chapter will compare data collected prior to the outbreak of COVID-19 to data collected after, both datasets dealing with similar issues involved with the sports discussed here. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
ABSTRACT
Animal specimens in natural history collections are invaluable resources in examining the historical context of pathogen dynamics in wildlife and spillovers to humans. For example, natural history specimens may reveal new associations between bat species and coronaviruses. However, RNA viruses are difficult to study in historical specimens because protocols for extracting RNA from these specimens have not been optimized. Advances have been made in our ability to recover nucleic acids from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded samples (FFPE) commonly used in human clinical studies, yet other types of formalin preserved samples have received less attention. Here, we optimize the recovery of RNA from formalin-fixed ethanol-preserved museum specimens in order to improve the usability of these specimens in surveys for zoonotic diseases. We provide RNA quality and quantity measures for replicate tissues subsamples of 22 bat specimens from five bat genera (Rhinolophus, Hipposideros, Megareops, Cynopterus, and Nyctalus) collected in China and Myanmar from 1886 to 2003. As tissues from a single bat specimen were preserved in a variety of ways, including formalin-fixed (8 bats), ethanol-preserved and frozen (13 bats), and flash frozen (2 bats), we were able to compare RNA quality and yield across different preservation methods. RNA extracted from historical museum specimens is highly fragmented, but usable for short-read sequencing and targeted amplification. Incubation of formalin-fixed samples with Proteinase-K following thorough homogenization improves RNA yield. This optimized protocol extends the types of data that can be derived from existing museum specimens and facilitates future examinations of host and pathogen RNA from specimens.