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

pandemic flu

One more gene between us and bird flu

We’re always in favor of stopping a massive viral pandemic, or at least knowing more about what might make one happen. So we read a recent PLOS Pathogens paper with interest. The general theme is similar to this February 2019 paper from Anice Lowen’s lab in PNAS. To paraphrase Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: birds and humans living together, mass hysteria!

Here, Emory researchers looked at the M segment of influenza virus, which appears to determine host restriction, or the ability of viruses that infect bird cells to migrate to mammals. The M segment, was important for emergence of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic flu.

One of eight influenza gene segments, the M segment encodes a protein that can interfere with cellular functions (autophagic vesicles) on which the virus relies. The new data reveal that reductions in M2 protein occurred in connection with past important adaptation events, such as when a Eurasian avian-like swine virus emerged from birds in the 1970s.

“This mechanism constitutes a novel paradigm in RNA virus host adaptation, and reveals a new species barrier for IAV, which may be highly relevant for the emergence of avian IAVs into humans,” the authors conclude. Read more

Posted on by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Bird flu shuffle probes viral compatibility

When influenza viruses that infect birds and humans meet in the same cell, they can shuffle their genomes and produce new strains that might have pandemic potential. Think of this process, called reassortment, as viruses having sex.

In the last several years, public health officials have been monitoring two varieties of bird flu viruses with alarming properties: H7N9 and H5N8. Scientists at Emory have been probing the factors that limit reassortment between these strains and a well-known strain (H3N2) that has been dominating the last few flu seasons in the United States.

Helen Branswell has an article in STAT this week, explaining that H5N8 actually emerged from reassortment  involving much-feared-but-not-damaging-to-humans-so-far H5N1:

Several years ago, these viruses effectively splintered, with some dumping their N1 neuraminidase — a gene that produces a key protein found on the surface of flu viruses — and replacing it with another. The process is called reassortment, and, in this case, it resulted in the emergence of a lot of new pairings over a fairly short period of time.

The most common and most dangerous viruses to emerge — for birds at least — have been H5N6 and H5N8 viruses. Both are highly pathogenic, meaning they kill domestic poultry.

“The H5N1 virus has not gone away. It’s just changed into different versions of itself,” explained influenza expert Malik Peiris, a professor of virology at the University of Hong Kong.

From the Emory study, the good news is that “packaging signals” on the H5 and H7 viral RNA genomes are often incompatible with the H3N2 viruses. That means it could be difficult for segments of the genome from the bird viruses to get wrapped up with the human viruses. But mix and match still occurred at a low level, particularly with H5N8. Read more

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NIAID Director Fauci: link seasonal and pandemic flu preparedness

Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, delivered the keynote address Sunday, April 18, as part of a three-day conference on H1N1 Virus: The First Pandemic of the 21st Century, sponsored by the Emory-UGA Influenza Pathogenesis and Immunology Research Center.

One of the most important lessons from this past year’s pandemic, Fauci said, is the need to “connect the dots” between seasonal and pandemic influenza and not view them as two separate phenomena.

Fauci enthusiastically supports the CDC’s call for universal flu vaccination.

“Rather than trying to figure out one priority group over another,” Fauci said, “if we can get into a rhythm of getting most people vaccinated each year, we will have most of the population with some degree of immunity. We will get into a situation where we don’t need to go from a seasonal approach to a crisis approach.

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