Harnessing natural history collections for collaborative pandemic preparedness

Abstract

Five years after the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, we have the opportunity to gather lessons learned about needed infrastructure for predicting, understanding, and mitigating future zoonotic disease outbreaks. The world's natural history museums hold some 3 billion specimens that document life on Earth (Wheeler et al. 2012), each of which represents organismal diversity at a specific location and time and may carry a record of that organism's interactions with other species, from mutualists to pathogens, and its environment. In the context of disease biology, these specimens are an underused resource for understanding the geographic distributions of pathogens and their hosts, the origins and spread of disease, and the ecological conditions leading to spillover (e.g., Cook et al. 2020, Soltis et al. 2020, Colella et al. 2021, Thompson et al. 2021, Weems et al. 2021, Mabry et al. 2023). Moreover, the impacts of land-use alterations on the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases through complex relationships involving host stress and immunity, pathogen dynamics, and microbiome shifts (Botto Nuñez et al. 2019, Weems et al. 2021) and through increased exploitation and trade of wildlife can be tracked and interpreted using collections. We emphasize in the present article the potential role that collections could play if integrated into the One Health ecosystem of resources (see box 1). We focus in the present article on zoonotic diseases and relevant zoological collections; however, the same principles apply to collections and other threats to global biodiversity (e.g., Torres Lopez et al. 2024)—for example, herbarium specimens as resources for understanding plant pathogens and the spread of disease related to the world's food supply (e.g., Ristaino et al. 2021, Burbano and Gutaker 2023). Despite their potential for contributing to pandemic preparedness, natural history collections are underused, and collaborations between the collections community and One Health efforts remain limited. To foster dialogue on the current and potential roles of museum collections in disease biology and how to move toward integrating this important infrastructure into mainstream pathobiology, two workshops funded by the National Science Foundation brought together participants from the museum collections community, One Health, pathobiology, bioinformatics, education, computer science, and art. In the present article, we highlight key issues and possible next steps that emerged from the workshops.