Roundup of New Research on How the Virus Does its Dirty Work

 

Today, a few notes on research I have run across about all the ways SARS-CoV-2 messes with your body.

Spiking Your Lungs

A lot of people assume the virus has to get into your cells and start replicating to do it's thing. Not necessarily true.   

According to a recent study the "spike" proteins on the virus surface do damage all by themselves, whether or not the viral material enters your cell. Effects include severe lung inflammation.  

The researcher said in an interview that “Our mouse model dramatically reduces the danger of doing this type of research by allowing COVID-19 lung injury to be studied without using the intact, live virus. This will greatly increase and diversify the ability to do COVID-19 research. Our model will also likely be useful for studying other coronaviruses.”

Checking Your Gut's Immune Response

To study how the virus affects your gut, scientists built 3-dimensional tissue cultures derived from actual human gut cells. They exposed them to the virus, and watched the immune reactions. 

Their study found that binding to the ACE-2 receptor (thought to be the main pathway to infection) was not the only factor in gut infection. Infected cells produced interferon, but the virus somehow interfered with the interferon's ability to signal to other cells that something is wrong.

"These findings reveal that SARS-CoV-2 curtails the immune response and highlights the gut as a pro-inflammatory reservoir that should be considered to fully understand SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis," said the article.

Invading Nervous System Cells

A conference presentation at Experimental Biology last week, reported here, shed light on how the virus messes with our nervous system. The researchers found that it not only affects the actual cells that do the work (neurons) but other cells that support those (astrocytes) too.

Astrocytes are responsible for getting nutrients from the blood to the neurons and keeping bad substances and pathogens out. The study found that both they and neurons have the ACE-2 receptors that the virus targets, but that the astrocytes are less likely to become infected.

The flip side is that if they do become infected, then the provide a gateway to the neurons.  Neurons can then become infected and damaged, causing a slew of neurological symptoms in victims.

Header image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

Popular posts from this blog

Another One Bites the Dust

Image
Hi all. Stepping out of retirement for a moment to say that the day has finally arrived. After four years of successfully avoiding COVID-19 infection I had a positive test yesterday. Symptoms are very mild—I've had worse colds. The provider at urgent care said almost all the cases they are seeing are the same. Mild symptoms may also be due to the fact that I had the original vaccine then the two boosters. All this time I thought I might be a NOVID —one of those people who never get the bug. But no, it must have been my assiduous mask wearing and avoidance of high-risk situations when things were bad. So here's double middle fingers to all the kooks who think masks don't work (I've not been wearing masks for months now). I don't know what variant I have but it's likely JN.1. It is said to be extraordinarily contagious and accounts for 60% of cases worldwide . It also tends to produce mild infections like the one I have.  This article claims that right now every...
Read more

AZ Pandemic Numbers Summary for the Seven Days Ending September 7: Mixed Picture

Image
  Image: Steampunk Computer Crunching Numbers by Dall-E Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending yesterday: It's a bit of a mixed picture this week. One thing is that the four-week changes are all in the right direction and not small. The weekly stat that looks the best is the statewide case rate, which fell by more than half.  At one time I'd have gotten very excited about that. But as I have mentioned many times before, case rates are no longer considered good indicators of conditions in the community because so many people are doing at-home tests that never get reported, and federal programs for free testing have ended. I have no case rate for Maricopa County. The dashboard where they report data says "The requested URL was rejected. Please consult with your administrator." I have reported the problem and will update this post if I find it has been fixed. Otherwise, new deaths dropped by a decent amount. On...
Read more

AZ Pandemic Numbers Summary for the Seven Days Ending May 10: This is the Last of These Updates

Image
  Here are the Arizona pandemic numbers and graph of statewide cases for the seven day period ending Wednesday: Everything is looking good, except a 29% increase in COVID-19 hospital beds. That is still within what has been normal variation since the beginning of the year, so nothing to get too excited about.  Deaths are up, but those numbers from from AzHDS, which  as we know  does not have reliable reporting practices. Given all of this, and given that the COVID-19 public health emergency ended yesterday , this is a good time to end these updates and retire the blog. I will continue to keep an eye on numbers and restart if it looks like a new wave is brewing, but I hope that is not necessary. Some of you have posted comments on the AZ Coronavirus  subreddit  saying you found these updates helpful for knowing when to take precautions. I'm happy to know this, because it has taken some work!   If you want to monitor things on your own going forward...
Read more