The Review 2015

33 Seeding the Future – Innovation Putting Ants on the Map There are 15,000 species of ants in the world but, until recently, there was no one source that could tell you where to find them. Now, an online resource dubbed ‘ antmaps’, developed by HKU and the Okinawa Institute of Sciences and Technology (OIST), is filling that void. Antmaps is the outcome of a four-year project to build the world’s f i r s t an t da t abase and se t up a website to visualise their global distribution. Dr Benoit Guénard (above) of the School of Biological Sciences worked with Dr Evan Economo of OIST to develop the resource, which enables entomologists to find out where different ants species can be found, look at species diversity in a specific region, and compare similarities and differences between regions. The website, at http://antmaps.org/, includes 170 ant species previously recorded in Hong Kong. It will soon be adding 15 newly- recorded species and possibly a dozen species new to science that were discovered in local surveys undertaken in the past year by Dr Guénard’s Insect Biodiversity and Biogeography Laboratory. Dr Guénard said their work helped to advance understanding of the diversity of ants, which was important not only for their conservation but also global biodiversity. “There is an urgent need for an increase in species descr ipt ion and geographical mapping, as many ecosystems suffer from intense human-induced disturbances,” he said. MERS Expert Leads Major Study Professor Patrick Woo Chiu-yat (above), who has chased the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) virus to Dubai and back, is now leading a $46.7 million study that will seek to unlock the virus’s evolution, infection routes and mechanism. Professor Woo and his team visited the Middle East in 2013 and 2014 where they discovered five types of viruses from camel faeces, as well as MERS coronavirus from camel tonsils. This meant doctors could quickly identify whether patients were infected so treatment could start sooner. Now, they have received funding from the Theme-based Research Scheme to answer such questions as why MERS infections can lead to pneumonia or kidney failure, and how the virus is able to defend itself against the human immune system. Colleagues from Hong Kong Baptist University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and City University of Hong Kong are also collaborating on the project. ME R S h a s a h i g h fatality rate, with nearly 20 per cent of people infected in the outbreak in South Korea earlier this year succumbing to the disease. “Unde r s t and i ng t he v i r us ’s mechanism, such as the details of its genes and proteins, will be important for formulating drugs or a vaccine,” Professor Woo said, adding they have already obtained some promising results and hope to flesh out the picture of MERS over the next two years. Professor Woo and his team previously identified bats as the ultimate source of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus. In April this year he received a prestigious Senior Medical Research Fellowship from the Croucher Foundation (see page 17). The Review 2015