This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Every year, birds migrate north and gather in a single location in the Arctic, and a team of University of Kentucky researchers is collaborating with Alaska Native communities to study how diseases spread and evolve at this gathering before they reach human populations. Scott Berry, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering's Department of Mechanical Engineering with a joint appointment in biomedical engineering, recently returned from a research trip to the northernmost community in the United States: Utqiaġvik, Alaska.
Accompanied by Ph.D. student August Bodin and lab manager Anni Noble, Berry joined partners from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to enable environmental sequencing of wildlife samples collected by the local community. Berry serves as the director of the Environmental Surveillance Center for Assessing Pathogen Emergence. The center's primary goal is to monitor the environment for biological threats with pandemic potential for humans.
As an engineer with a background in device development, Berry focuses on enabling genomic analysis in regions without easy access to medical laboratories. By bringing technology directly to these areas and training the people who live and hunt there, his team is working to eliminate global health blind spots. "Our goal is to really enable genomic analysis in all corners of the world.
Pandemics don't respect borders, national borders or boundaries. To get a good sense of what's circulating out there, we need to go test places that are off the beaten path," Berry said. To accomplish this in northern Alaska, Berry's team introduced newly developed microfluidic chips designed to simplify and streamline genomic sequencing directly in the field, building local capacity for rapid testing.
They are also providing training and developing instruction manuals for the product when it's ready to move past the prototype stage. Utqiaġvik, the northernmost community in the U.S., is a unique ecological crossroads. It is a major hotspot for migratory birds because multiple major flyways—the Mississippi, Pacific and Atlantic migratory routes—converge in this Arctic location.
Diverse avian populations from across the globe gather in one region to breed and socialize, making it an ideal environment for viruses to jump between species. "Think about how planes fly over the poles to get to Europe and Asia," Berry explained. "The birds migrate through Alaska, and all these flyways come together.
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