Project description:The domestic ferret has recently been described as a uniformly lethal model of infection for three species of Ebolavirus known to be pathogenic to humans. Reagents to systematically analyze the ferret host response to infection are lacking; however, the recent publication of a draft ferret genome has opened the potential for transcriptional analysis of ferret models of disease. In this work, we present comparative analysis of longitudinally sampled blood taken from ferrets and non-human primates infected with lethal doses of the Makona strain of Zaire ebolavirus. Strong induction of proinflammatory and prothrombotic signaling programs were present in both ferrets and non-human primates and both transcriptomes were similar to previously published datasets of fatal cases of human Ebola virus infection.
Project description:Evolution of transcriptional regulation is thought to be a major cause of the evolution of phenotypic traits. We compared DNase I Hypersensitive sites in fibroblast cells from five primates (human, chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan, and macaque). We identified approximately 90,000 DHS sites, of which 59% are not significantly different between species, 27% are differential and likely due to a single evolutionary change, and 14% are differential and likely due to multiple changes. We found that including additional closely related species allows us to better distinguish between accessibility changes that are specific to a single species and those that have experienced changes in chromatin accessibility across multiple species during evolution.
Project description:The avian influenza A(H7N9) virus has caused high mortality in humans, especially in the elderly; however, little is known about the mechanistic basis for this. In this study, we employed non-human primates to evaluate the effect of aging on the pathogenicity of A(H7N9) virus. We observed that A(H7N9) virus infection of aged animals (defined as 20–26 years) caused more severe symptoms than infection of young animals (defined as 2 3 years). In aged animals, lung inflammation was weak and virus infection was sustained. Although cytokine and chemokine expression in the lungs of most aged animals was lower than that in the lungs of young animals, one aged animal showed dysregulated proinflammatory cytokine and chemokine production, resulting in it being euthanized. These results suggest that attenuated or dysregulated immune responses in aged animals are responsible for the severe symptoms observed among elderly patients infected with A(H7N9) virus.