报告题目：Holy immune balance, batman!

报告人：王林发，新加坡Duke-NUS医学院研究员/PI，澳洲科学院院士

主持人：黄静 副教授

报告时间：2018年9月26日（周三） 下午15:00-16:30

报告地点：生命科学学院534报告厅

 

报告人简介：Prof Linfa Wang is the director of the Programme in Emerging Infectious Diseases at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore. He is an international leader in the field of emerging zoonotic viruses and virus-host interaction. He was a member of the WHO SARS Scientific Research Advisory Committee, and played a key role in identification of bats as the natural host of SARS-like viruses. He has over 350 publications including papers in Nature, Science, Nature Review in Medicine and Nature Review in Microbiology with a current h-index of 71. He is the Editor-in-Chief for the open access Virology Journal. In 2010, Prof Wang was elected to the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

 

报告摘要：Since the discovery of Hendra virus in Australia in 1994, bats have been implicated as an important reservoir of many high profile emerging zoonotic viruses including Nipah, SARS, MERS, Marburg and Ebola viruses. Several studies have recently demonstrated that bats are special as virus reservoir in two aspects: 1) they harbour more viruses than any other mammalian order (including rodents); and 2) they are able to co-exist asymptomatically with a large number of different viruses, some of which are highly lethal in other mammalian hosts. Our group has been researching into the question on “what makes bats special?” and made several discoveries which may help to explain bats’ special ability to maintain an effective balance between defence/resistance and tolerance.  We hypothesize that their special ability to response to stresses (such as DNA damage and infection) is driven by bats’ adaptation to flight since their divergence from land mammals approximately 100 million years ago. A brief review of our latest findings will be presented in the context of immune balance and viral infections.