Single-cell profiling of Ebola virus reveals viral and host dynamics

Submitted by admin on Mon, 11/23/2020 - 00:00

2020-11-23 By Quick Biology

Ebola virus was first discovered in 1976, it has been infecting people, leading to outbreaks in several African countries. Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) is a rare and deadly zoonotic disease in human and non-human primates (Fig.1, ref1). Understanding the virus life cycle (e.g. host preferences/transmission, virus survival rate/stability in certain environments) helps us prevent infection.  Understanding virus-host cell interaction can be the key to novel therapeutics or vaccines.

In Cell (Nov.2020), under BSL-4 containment, scientists from Harvard-MIT-Broad, National Institutes of Health used rhesus monkey as a disease model. They collected blood samples from a total of 21 rhesus monkeys at multiple days post-EBOV inoculation, extracted peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) (Fig.2, ref2). By single-cell transcriptome profiling (100,000 transcriptomes) using Seq-well and CyTOF-based single-cell protein quantification (15,000,000 protein profiles),  they dissected host-virus interactions and comprehensively catalog changes in cell-type abundance and cell state over the course of EVD. This is the first BSL-4 investigation of a pathogen with high-dimensional single-cell (RNA level and protein level) technology.

Highlights:

1. Interferon response is suppressed in infected cells but activated in bystander cells

2. EBOV represses antiviral genes and upregulates pro-viral genes in infected cells

3. Proliferative CD14– CD16– monocyte precursors expand in circulation during EVD

4. Identification of expression markers of EBOV tropism for circulating cells in vivo

Figure 1:  Ebola Virus Ecology Graphic. (ref1)

Figure 1 Ebola Virus Ecology Graphic.jpg

Figure 2: Non-human primate model to study Ebola-cell infection. (ref2)

Figure 2 Non-human primate model to study Ebola-cell infection.png

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Reference:

  1. 1. CDC online: https://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/resources/virus-ecology.html
  2. 2. Kotliar, D. et al. Single-Cell Profiling of Ebola Virus Disease In Vivo Reveals Viral and Host Dynamics. Cell 1–19 (2020). doi:10.1016/j.cell.2020.10.002