Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

cytokines

SARS-CoV-2 culture system using human airway cells

Journalist Roxanne Khamsi had an item in Wired highlighting how virologists studying SARS-CoV-2 and its relatives have relied on Vero cells, monkey kidney cells with deficient antiviral responses.

Vero cells are easy to culture and infect with viruses, so they are a standard laboratory workhorse. Unfortunately, they may have given people the wrong idea about the controversial drug hydroxychloroquine, Khamsi writes.

In contrast, Emory virologist Mehul Suthar’s team recently published a Journal of Virology paper on culturing SARS-CoV-2 in primary human airway epithelial cells, which are closer to the cells that the coronavirus actually infects “out on the street.”

Effect of interferon-beta on SARS-CoV-2 in primary human epithelial airway cells. Green = SARS-CoV-2, Red = F-actin, Blue = Hoechst (DNA). Courtesy of Abigail Vanderheiden

The Emory researchers found that airway cells are permissive to SARS-CoV-2 infection, but mount a weak antiviral response lacking certain interferons (type I and type III). Interferons are cytokines, part of the immune system’s response to viral infection. They were originally named for their ability to interfere with viral replication, but they also rouse immune cells and bolster cellular defenses.

In SARS-CoV-2 infection, the “misdirected” innate immune response is dominated instead by inflammatory and fibrosis-promoting cytokines, something others have observed as well.

“Early administration of type I or III IFN could potentially decrease virus replication and disease,” the authors conclude. We note that an NIH-supported clinical trial testing a type I interferon (along with remdesivir) for COVID-19 just started.

The first author of the paper is IMP graduate student Abigail Vanderheiden. As with a lot of recent SARS-CoV-2 work, this project included contributions from several labs at Emory: Arash Grakoui’s, Steve Bosinger’s, Larry Anderson’s, and Anice Lowen’s, along with help from University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment