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July 30, 2014 – One of the leading international science journals, Nature, recently featured the research of Matthew D. Venesky, visiting assistant professor of biology at Allegheny College, and his colleagues on vaccinating frogs against a harmful fungus. The paper appeared as the cover story and was published July 9, 2014.

According to the group’s paper, titled “Amphibians acquire resistance to live and dead fungus overcoming fungal immunosuppression,” a fungal pathogen has been linked to the declines of many amphibian species worldwide.

“Using vaccines to induce resistance in captive-bred amphibians prior to a return to the wild could make it possible in the future to repopulate areas that have seen catastrophic declines,” Venesky explains.

Venesky was involved in three of the four experiments that were presented in the Nature paper, and on one of them he was the lead investigator.

Nature is an international journal, published weekly, with original, groundbreaking research spanning all of the scientific disciplines.

Abstract
The fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd, has been implicated in the declines of many amphibian species worldwide. There has been little evidence that amphibians can acquire resistance to this pathogen, but now Jason Rohr and colleagues present experiments on several amphibian species, including the Cuban tree frog Osteopilus septentrionalis that demonstrate that frogs can learn to avoid the pathogen, can overcome Bd-induced immunosuppression after repeated exposure, and can be immunized against it using dead pathogen. Conservation projects have removed threatened amphibian species from Bd-positive habitats and are breeding them in captivity. Using vaccines to induce resistance in captive-bred amphibians prior to a return to the wild could make it possible in the future to repopulate areas that have seen catastrophic declines.

Link to the paper in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v511/n7508/full/nature13491.html

About Matthew D. Venesky, Ph.D.
Venesky is visiting assistant professor in the Biology Department at Allegheny College. His research focuses on the ecology of infectious diseases, physiological ecology, and conservation biology. His work has been featured in numerous publications, including Nature Climate Change, Journal of Animal Ecology, Conservation Biology, and Biology Letters. He has a bachelor’s degree from Gannon University and a Ph.D. from the University of Memphis.