I'm so excited for this project to be published! A huge thank you to @danjbecker.bsky.social @colincarlson.bsky.social , Amanda Vicente-Santos, @commsbio.nature.com, and @viralemergence.org 💗🦇💗🦇

very cool paper, I'm hoping to use this framework for my dissertation research!

We mapped the geographic distributions of bat clades with unusually high virulence in tandem with spatial data on anthropogenic footprint to visualize "hotspots" of zoonotic risk to help guide viral surveillance ☺️ (5/5)

Our analyses show that bats do not come out as a group with uniform viral epidemic potential: virulence and transmissibility are clustered only within distinct subclades of bats, often within cosmopolitan families spanning both the western and eastern hemispheres! (4/5)

We investigated whether bats, as an entire order, emerge organically to have a higher propensity to host virulent viruses than other taxa or if analyses that are agnostic to taxonomic order would instead identify subclades of bats exhibiting high virulence. (3/5)

Prior research shows that bats (order: Chiroptera) host high viral diversity and the greatest number of viruses with high virulence (i.e., severity of disease) in humans. (2/5)