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

cytomegalovirus

How CMV gets around

Human cytomegalovirus infects most people in the United States by the time they are 40 years old. HCMV is usually harmless in children and adults, but when pregnant women are infected for the first time, the infection can lead to hearing, vision or other problems in their babies once they are born. [It is also a problem for organ transplant recipients.] According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, HCMV is usually transmitted by sexual contact, diapers or toys. Notably absent are references to needles. That means scientists who study how mouse CMV infection takes place by injecting the virus into the animal’s body are missing a critical step.

Postdoc Lisa Daley-Bauer, working with CMV expert Ed Mocarski, has a recent paper in the journal Cell Host & Microbe illuminating how the virus travels from sites of initial infections to the rest of the body. Defining the cells the virus uses to get around could have implications for efforts to design a HCMV vaccine.

The virus hijacks part of the immune system, the authors find. CMV emits its own attractant (or chemokine) for patrolling monocytes, a type of white blood cell that circulates in the skin and peripheral tissues. This attractant, called MCK2, is only important when mice are infected by footpad inoculation, not by systemic injection.

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment