Before SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, spread across the world in 2020, tuberculosis was responsible for more deaths globally than any other infectious disease. But thanks to targeted public health efforts in the U.S. and globally, tuberculosis cases had been steadily falling for decades.
Claudia Gentry-Weeks, associate professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, will be cloning genes that code for antimicrobial peptides and isolating bacteriophages from fish farms, in collaboration with the Universidad de Murcia.
“We know the benefits of green space in reducing premature mortality,” said David Rojas-Rueda, an epidemiology professor at Colorado State University who has studied the health benefits of vegetation but was not involved in the latest paper. “This study explains how this could happen by describing how green spaces can modify how genes are expressed.”