There's a reason soldiers go through basic training before heading into combat: Without careful instruction, green recruits armed with powerful weapons could be as dangerous to one another as to the enemy.
A startling indicates that obesity may reduce the immune response to the current COVID-19 vaccines, along with other factors like age and sex. This could have significant implications for vaccination strategies in obese people.
Optimal storage protocols of wastewater samples for SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection
As the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to spread among millions of people worldwide, scientists search for reliable ways to monitor it and predict new outbreaks. Several reports have dealt with the quantitative detection of the causative pathogen, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), in wastewater.
A new preprint released on the
medRxiv server by researchers at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, takes this further in order to establish the limits of storage procedures while working on viral surveillance in this area.
The detection of the virus in wastewater offers the chance to carry out viral monitoring in a large population, including those with and without symptoms of infection. However, these samples often need to be stored until collection from different wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) is complete.
SARS-CoV-2 modulates host cell central carbon metabolism for reproduction
A team of scientists from Sweden and India has recently characterized the host cell metabolic alterations associated with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Their findings reveal that SARS-CoV-2 modulates the host cell s central carbon metabolism to facilitate replication and infection propagation. Moreover, they observe that the severity of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) primarily depends on the blood levels of glucose, mannose, and glutamate. The study is currently available on the
Background
Since its emergence in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China, SARS-CoV-2, the causative pathogen of COVID-19 disease, has infected 114 million people and claimed 2.52 million lives globally.
Study shows how D614G variant gains upper hand over original SARS-CoV-2 virus
Prior to the emergence of new mutants of the coronavirus, such as the British variant B.1.1.7, the SARS-CoV-2 variant named D614G had already mutated from the original SARS-CoV-2 pathogen that triggered the pandemic.
D614G has rapidly spread to become the most abundant variant worldwide and this D614G mutation remains in all the new emerging variants. An international team including researchers from Bern has now been able to demonstrate in both the laboratory and in animal models why the D614G variant was able to gain the upper hand over the original SARS-CoV-2 virus.