Page 214 - Eceptor News Today

A research group from Osaka University led by Professor Hisashi Arase and consisting of researchers from the Research Institute for Microbial Diseases, the Institute for Protein Research, the Immunology Frontier Research Center, the Center for Infectious Diseases, and the Graduate School of Medicine has discovered for the first time that both neutralizing antibodies that protect against infection as well as infection-enhancing antibodies that increase infectivity are produced after infection wit...

Researchers compared the nasal microbiome of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients, healthy individuals, and healthcare workers. These studies indicated an increase in the pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa present in the nasal microbiome of COVID-19 patients, which may be responsible for other secondary infections.

Next-generation SARS-CoV-2 subunit vaccine candidate elicits powerful immunity in preclinical trials While over a score of vaccines against the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) have been rolled out in different countries, the emergence of new variants with partial resistance to antibodies elicited by earlier variants poses an ongoing challenge to the effort to control the spread of the virus. New research – by scientists at the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins ...

Researchers take steps to standardize correlates of protection against SARS-CoV-2 Researchers in the UK and Germany have identified a range of assays and biomarkers of humoral (antibody) immunity against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that can be used to define correlates of protection in future studies. Wherever suitable, antibody-based parameters were expressed in International Units (IU) and Binding Antibody Units (BAU). "The adoption of common results reporting unitage in IU and BAU as...

Superoxide produced in the inner ear cochlea causes major types of acquired hearing loss Professor UEYAMA Takehiko (Biosignal Research Center, Kobe University) and the inner ear research group (Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine) have identified the cell types in the inner ear cochlea responsible for the production of superoxide (Nox3-expressing cells). They achieved this by using genetically modified mice that they developed. The researchers discovered that these superoxide-producing cel...

Genetically engineered intestinal organoids reveal potential treatment targets against SARS-CoV-2 Using CRISPR/Cas9 and human intestinal organoids to study genes implicated in the biology of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), researchers from the Netherlands identified a specific serine protease (TMPRSS2) as an attractive pan-coronavirus therapeutic target. Their exciting findings are available in a study currently available on the bioRxiv* preprint server. The curre...

In January 2020, the first complete severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) genome sequence was deposited to GenBank. Since then, the amount of new genome sequences has increased rapidly at GenBank and GISAID. This has laid the foundations for analyzing the virulence, antigenicity, pathogenicity, and transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 mutations.

Memory B cells with a functional anti-SARS-CoV-2 response persist despite loss of specific IgG In Munich, Germany, scientists at Ludwig Maximilian University studied temporal adaptive immunity to severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to better understand protection against re-infection. They found functional properties of persisting memory B specific to SARS-CoV-2 may help in protect against the virus. When a pathogen infects, it elicits an active immune response. The ada...

Computationally designed peptide blocks the entry of SARS-CoV, SARS-CoV-2, and MERS-CoV It is essential to face some grim facts about the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pathogen. The ongoing COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic, started in December 2019, may last for many years. SARS-CoV-2, the causative agent of COVID-19, is the seventh member of the Coronaviridae family known to infect humans. The SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome c...

In a short correspondence paper recently uploaded to the Lancet by Ramanathan, Muthukumar et al. (May 19th, 2021) the affinity of labeled SARS-CoV-2 spike receptor-binding domain proteins sourced from each of these two variants of concern towards human angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) recombinant proteins is investigated using microscale thermophoresis, confirming the enhanced affinity towards the receptor observed in other studies.