Infectious diseases, bioterrorism, focus of new biocontainment lab

A new, 38,000-square-foot regional biocontainment laboratory at Colorado State University, unveiled in October, will help researchers focus on the preventions, diagnoses, and cures for some of the world's most deadly infectious diseases.

The Rocky Mountain Regional Biocontainment Laboratory, featuring level-three biocontainment security, is among the most secure laboratories of its kind in the world and will house internationally recognized infectious-disease research already underway at Colorado State.

Colorado State is an international research leader for West Nile virus, drug-resistant tuberculosis, yellow fever, dengue fever, hantavirus, plague, tularemia, chronic wasting disease, and other infectious diseases. Infectious diseases are the leading cause of death in the world, and new and safe vaccines, drugs, and tests are crucial for local, national, and global health.

Bioterrorism and emerging diseases

The new facility also provides safer equipment to research ways to protect the United States from bioterrorism and emerging diseases such as avian influenza. The laboratory will bring University researchers together with scientists in government, academia, and industry to develop new vaccines, therapies, and diagnostics to help people throughout the world.

The facility also will house the Rocky Mountain Regional Center of Excellence for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, a multidisciplinary intellectual collaboration of researchers from Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming.

The Rocky Mountain RCE will focus on zoonotic emerging diseases – animal diseases that are transmissible to humans – and develop new vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics for these emerging diseases; train regional and national scientists, physicians, veterinarians, and public health personnel in emerging diseases and biosecurity; and help state and federal agencies respond to emerging diseases.

Federal research

The new lab will complement infectious disease research already underway at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U. S. Department of Agriculture, and CSU’s Bioenvironmental Hazards Research Building and Arthropod-borne and Infectious Diseases Laboratory.

The building project began in 2003 when the National Institutes of Health awarded the University $17 million. Two years later, CSU won a $5 million supplemental grant. An additional $8 million in University funding rounded out the $30 million project.

Arctic soil may provide clues to climate-change effects

Colorado State researchers are joining a global effort funded by the Fourth International Polar Year to study the impact of climate change on the Arctic.

The behavior of tiny microorganisms in Arctic soils may tell scientists how climate change will affect the fragile soils of this region, say Colorado State University scientists. CSU will work with researchers from the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Toledo to study proteins in the cells of the soil's microorganisms – a new field of research known as soil proteomics.

The research is funded as part of the Fourth International Polar Year, a global effort to support scientific investigations of the Arctic, which is vulnerable to rapid climate change.

"The distribution of plants in the Arctic is changing because of global warming and that is having an impact on microorganisms," said Ken Reardon, CSU professor of chemical and biological engineering. The researchers will evaluate how the constant freezing-thawing process affects the microbes and ultimately the entire Arctic ecosystem.

Arctic plants

The scientists will study the tundra systems of the low Arctic in northern Alaska and the high Arctic of western Greenland, which cover the full latitude and climate range – and by extension most of the dominant Arctic plant communities – within the terrestrial Arctic.

Soil microbes are not dormant in frozen soils, said Matthew Wallenstein, ecology research scientist at CSU. "The activity of microbes during the Arctic winter ... strongly affects the plants that live in these cold environments and has the potential to affect the concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere."

Climate change and ecosystems

The researchers will bring field samples back to CSU where they will look at the proteins soil microbes use to survive in freezing conditions and in repeated freeze-thaw conditions. On the tundra, the top layers of the soil that repeatedly freeze and thaw as they warm in the daytime sun and freeze at night can lead to the release of carbon dioxide, a contributor to climate change.

"This research will give us a basic understanding of these processes so we can better predict the future effects of climate change on these important ecosystems," Wallenstein said.