Nothing he tried had worked. For Sigurjon Jakobsson, the trip to Atlanta with his family was a last-ditch effort to wake up. He had struggled with sleeping excessively for several years before coming from Iceland to see a visionary neurologist, who might have answers.
In high school, Sigurjon was a decathlete competing as part of Iceland’s national sports team. But at the age of 16, an increasing need for sleep began to encroach upon his life. Read more
Advances in both light and electron microscopy are improving scientists’ ability to visualize viruses such as HIV, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), measles, influenza, and Zika in their native states.
Researchers from Emory University School of Medicine and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta developed workflows for cryo-correlative light and electron microscopy (cryo-CLEM), which were published in the January 2017 issue of Nature Protocols.
An example of the images of viruses obtainable with cryo-CLEM. Pseudotyped HIV-1 particles undergoing endocytosis. Viral membrane = light blue. Mature core = yellow. Clathrin cages = purple. From Hampton et al Nat. Protocols (2016)
Wright and her colleagues have refined techniques for studying viruses in the context of the cells they infect. That way, they can see in detail how viruses enter and are assembled in cells, or how genetic modifications alter viral structures or processing.
“Much of what is known about how some viruses replicate in cells is really a black box at the ultrastructural level,” she says. “We see ourselves as forming bridges between light and electron microscopy, and opening up new realms of biological questions.”
Wright is director of Emory’s Robert P. Apkarian Integrated Electron Microscopy Core and a Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Investigator. The co-first authors of the Nature Protocols paper are postdoctoral fellows Cheri Hampton, PhD. and Joshua Strauss, PhD, and graduate students Zunlong Ke and Rebecca Dillard.
The Wright lab’s work on cryo-CLEM includes collaborations with Gregory Melikyan in Emory’s Department of Pediatrics, Phil Santangelo in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory, and Paul Spearman, now at Cincinnati Children’s.
For this technique, virus-infected or transfected cells are grown on fragile carbon-coated gold grids and then “vitrified,” meaning that they are cooled rapidly so that ice crystals do not form. Once cooled, the cells are examined by cryo-fluorescent light microscopy and cryo-electron tomography. Read more
Crafting a vaccine against RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) has been a minefield for 50 years, but scientists believe they have found the right balance.
A 3-D rendering of a live-attenuated respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) particle, captured in a near-to-native state by cryo-electron tomography. Surface glycoproteins (yellow) are anchored on the viral membrane (cyan), with ribonucleoprotein complexes inside (red). Image courtesy of Zunlong Ke and Elizabeth Wright.
The researchers examined the engineered virus using cryo-electron microscopy and cryo-electron tomography techniques, and showed that it is structurally very similar to wild type virus. When used as a vaccine, it can protect mice and cotton rats from RSV infection.
“Our paper shows that it’s possible to attenuate RSV without losing any immunogenicity,” says senior author Martin Moore, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and a Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Research Scholar. “This is a promising live-attenuated vaccine candidate that merits further investigation clinically.”
The next steps for this vaccine are to produce a clinical grade lot and conduct a phase 1 study of safety and immunogenicity in infants, Moore says. Read more
Tetherin is a host cell factor that mechanically links HIV-1 to the plasma membrane. This is the first time anyone has imaged tethered HIV-1 by cryo-electron tomography. In doing so, we were able to learn about the length and arrangement of the tethers.
Cryo-electron tomography is an imaging technique which enables scientists to look at biological specimens in a â€œnative-likeâ€ (frozen hydrated) state, without the chemical fixatives or heavy metal stains typically used for conventional electron microscopy.
The 3D reconstruction was manually segmented to highlight the different viral and cellular components: HIV-1 virions (lavender), mature conical-cores (aqua blue), immature Gag lattice (pink), plasma membrane (peach), rod-like tethers (sea green).
Everything is connected, especially in the brain. A protein called BAI1 involved in limiting the growth of brain tumors is also critical for spatial learning and memory, researchers have discovered.
Mice missing BAI1 have trouble learning and remembering where they have been. Because of the loss of BAI1, their neurons have changes in how they respond to electrical stimulation, and subtle alterations in parts of the cell needed for information processing.
Erwin Van Meir, PhD, and his colleagues at Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University have been studying BAI1 (brain-specific angiogenesis inhibitor 1) for several years. Part of the BAI1 protein can stop the growth of new blood vessels, which growing cancers need. Normally highly active in the brain, the BAI1 gene is lost or silenced in brain tumors, suggesting that it acts as a tumor suppressor.
The researchers were surprised to find that the brains of mice lacking the BAI1 gene looked normal anatomically. They didnâ€™t develop tumors any faster than normal, and they didnâ€™t have any alterations in their blood vessels, which the researchers had anticipated based on BAI1â€™s role in regulating blood vessel growth. What they did have was problems with spatial memory.
Biomedical engineer Yonggang Ke‘s “DNA origami” artwork appears on the cover of Nature Methods, as part of a celebration of the journal’s 10th anniversary. Ke designed self-assembling DNA strands that would form a cylinder and a ring structure, let them assemble, and obtained images with transmission electron microscopy. The height of the final image is 120 nanometers, smaller than the wavelengths of visible light and about the size of an influenza or HIV virion.