HOW THE PANDEMIC PUT BAT IMMUNOLOGY IN THE SPOTLIGHT

Foo, who manages the colony and is affiliated with Duke-National University of Singapore (Duke-NUS) Medical School, and Yroy, a veterinary technician at SingHealth Experimental Medicine Centre, have nurtured the bats for years. The colonywas set up by Lin-fa Wang, a virologist at Duke-NUS Medical School to create a controlled setting for studying bat biology, including the inner workings of their immune system. Attendance at talks and conferences about bats is rising - at one symposium hosted last year in the United States, there were 30% more participants compared with the same event organized before the pandemic - and funders are ploughing money into studies of bats and infectious diseases: in 2021, for instance, both China and the United States announced specific funding pots for research into bats and viruses. The latest research is filling in details of the biological mechanisms underpinning the bat immune response, including the identification of cell types that are potentially unique to bats1.