Over thirty five years worth of tissue and blood samples from Australia’s longest running rabbit monitoring site at Turretfield Research Centre (SA) were at risk of being lost until Rabbit-Free Australia and a team of researchers stepped in to secure their future. Those samples, and others from sites around Australia and remote islands, were catalogued, then stored in Adelaide University’s BioBank by Dr Amy Iannella. The Foundation thanks the University for accepting this valuable research collection.
Over 20,000 rabbit tissue and blood samples were processed. Half the samples come from a long-running capture-mark-recapture project at Turretfield, meaning they can matched with records of birth date, weight over time, pregnancies, dates of exposure to virus outbreaks, antibody status for RHDV and myxomatosis, and sometimes date and cause of death (eg during virus outbreaks).
By storing both tissue samples (liver is useful for detecting parasites and genetic sequencing) and serum samples (useful for detecting antibodies and trace amounts of DNA if needed) this collection can facilitate research that was never even conceived when the samples were first collected (many before next generation sequencing was commercially available).
The catalogued library of samples is an uncommonly rare data source. It has already been used to detect the presence of a newly discovered gammaherpesvirus in Australian rabbits, and it will be THE enabling factor in a $1.5 million project led by Prof Frank Jiggins (University of Cambridge) for a study of how a vertebrate population (wild rabbits) adapts to a severe disease emergence (RHDV).
It is already proving to be exceptionally useful and is expected to be a key resource for many projects to come. For more information, see the final report; here.