Harnessing natural history collections for collaborative pandemic preparedness

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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. Bartonella: Bartonella is a bacterial genus known to cause human zoonoses such as Carrión's disease, cat-scratch fever, and trench fever (Jacomo et al. 2002). Using a targeted DNA enrichment approach, researchers identified Bartonella (and other zoonotic pathogens) in archived tissue samples from the mammal research collections housed in the Natural Sciences Research Laboratory at the Museum of Texas Tech University (TTU). Bartonella was found in 14 of 36 samples examined, consisting of rodents from Mexico and Senegal. This effort provides the framework for large-scale screening of pathogens in museum specimens, giving public health scientists a unique spatiotemporal perspective on zoonotic pathogen distribution, host associations, and evolution (Enabulele et al. 2023). Hantaviruses: In 1993, a lethal hantavirus strain emerged in the southwestern United States, killing 10 individuals in the Four Corners region (Nichol et al. 1993). Described as Sin Nombre Virus (SNV), this was the second known hantavirus in the Western Hemisphere. Through traditional biological fieldwork (i.e., preservation of historical voucher specimens and associated frozen tissue samples) led by the Museum of Southwestern Biology at the University of New Mexico and TTU, researchers screened potential mammalian host species for the newly identified virus (i.e., SNV). Specimens showed that SNV had been circulating in the Southwest long before the 1993 outbreak, and the virus was detected in multiple host species (Yates et al. 2002; Goodfellow et al. 2025). In addition, researchers determined that hantavirus prevalence was cyclic and corresponded with El Niño climate cycles (Yates et al. 2002). Subsequent screening of museum tissue samples has significantly expanded the list of known hantaviruses and mammalian hosts, which now include moles, shrews, and bats (e.g., Arai et al. 2008, Yanagihara et al. 2014). Mpox: Mpox (or monkeypox) is a viral zoonotic disease that is transmitted through animal-to-human and human-to-human contact (Reynolds et al. 2007). Originally identified from a colony of laboratory monkeys in Denmark (Magnus et al. 1959), Mpox is endemic to central and western Africa (Adetifa et al. 2023). Natural history collections have been critical to understanding the biology of the virus. For example, several orders of African mammals were collected and screened for Mpox to determine the extent of local infection. In total, six rodents and one elephant shrew were positive. These samples were identified and deposited in the Field Museum of Natural History (Doty et al. 2017). In addition, collections housed in the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Royal Museum for Central Africa were critical to identifying Mpox infections in a longitudinal series of African rope squirrel (Funisciurus sp.) specimens collected over a century (1899–1993). These data shifted the date of first detection of the virus by approximately a half century (Tiee et al. 2018). Yellow fever: The Yellow Fever Service was an organization developed in the 1930s through a collaboration between the Brazilian Ministry of Education and the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation (Soper 1977, Farley 2004). Through this collaboration, public health scientists from both organizations worked with biodiversity scientists from the AMNH to collect, voucher, and identify animal specimens to determine possible reservoirs of yellow fever (Gilmore 1943, Kumm and Laemmert 1950, de Oliveira and Franco 2005). Specimens were deposited in AMNH collections and used to determine the sylvatic transmission cycle of yellow fever virus (Soper et al. 1933, de Oliveira and Franco 2005), leading to the short-term eradication of the primary mosquito vector (Aedes aegypti) in Brazil (Laemmert et al. 1946, Löwy 1997). These specimens are still available to researchers via loan from the AMNH collections (Thompson et al. 2021). To ensure the data and expertise held in museums worldwide are effectively used to predict and prevent pandemics, these resources must be connected to disciplines and groups beyond the traditional museum user base. The data and expertise networks represented at our workshops do not yet organically intersect, and a reciprocal lack of shared knowledge and resources hampers progress (Kading and Kingston 2020). Organizations and individuals not directly connected to collections often lack awareness of the data and samples available in museums, including ancillary data and expertise associated with each specimen (e.g., community membership) that can create new research opportunities. Building interdisciplinary networks will improve access to and use of both specimens and data in collections. Although data aggregators, such as GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility; gbif.org) and iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections; idigbio.org), host hundreds of millions of specimen records, work is needed to expand data mobilization to include information about species interactions, phenology, and other traits that can be gleaned from specimens (Balk et al. 2022). Improvements to data mobilization must also be reflected in the search interfaces of data aggregators, so that host–pathogen data are findable and accessible to biomedical researchers and disease ecologists. Artists at our workshops illustrated presentations and conversations in real time (figure 1), capturing topics such as finding fundi

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