Biology subjects

Terry, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Terry, M..

5 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Infection Of Rhesus Macaques With Onyong-nyong Virus UVIR-O804 Recapitulates Key Aspects of Human Clinical Disease

1.Onyong-nyong virus (ONNV) is a mosquito-borne alphavirus first isolated in Uganda in 1959. Since its discovery, ONNV has caused several outbreaks in Africa, manifesting clinically as fever, rash, and joint/muscle pain lasting months. Currently, we have a limited understanding of ONNV infection and disease in relevant animal models, which restricts the evaluation of vaccines and therapeutics. In 1967, Binn et al. reported that infection of rhesus macaques (RMs) with ONNV failed to induce viremia in two animals. This may be attributed to the potential attenuation of the virus through extensive passaging. To mitigate this issue, we constructed an infectious clone from the sequence of ONNV-UVRI0804 (ONNV0804), a 2017 clinical isolate from a febrile patient in Uganda. This strain demonstrated high pathogenicity in immunocompetent mice, resulting in an earlier and more severe onset of disease and significantly higher viremia compared to a highly passaged control strain ONNVUgMP30. In the current study, three male and three female rhesus macaques were subcutaneously inoculated with ONNV0804. All animals became viremic at 2 days post inoculation (dpi). Both classical and nonclassical monocytes were activated (CD169+), peaking at 3 dpi, which corresponded with the peak of viremia. Additionally, CD4+ and CD8+ effector memory T cells and memory B cells began proliferating in peripheral blood by day 7, peaking at day 10, which also corresponded to the timing of neutralizing antibody development, indicating a robust adaptive immune response to ONNV0804. Finally, key clinical disease manifestations were recapitulated, including lymphadenopathy and histological features of early-stage arthritis. Taken together, rhesus macaque infection with ONNV0804 clinical isolate is a promising model for investigating immune responses to alphaviruses and evaluating vaccines to protect against future epidemics. 2. Author summaryOnyong-nyong virus (ONNV) is a mosquito-transmitted alphavirus that causes fever, rash, and prolonged joint and muscle pain, similar to chikungunya virus and other arthritogenic alphaviruses. Despite its capacity to cause outbreaks in Africa, ONNV remains understudied, and there are currently no approved vaccines or therapeutics to prevent or treat infection and disease. A major barrier to advancing ONNV research has been the lack of suitable animal models to study the virus and investigate host immune responses. We engineered an ONNV infectious clone of a recent clinical isolate sequenced from a patient in Uganda (ONNV0804) that causes robust infection and disease in immunocompetent mice. In the current study, we provide data demonstrating that this contemporary ONNV strain infects rhesus macaques. Notably, rhesus macaques developed detectable viremia, rash, lymphadenopathy, joint and muscle inflammation, and strong innate and adaptive immune responses following subcutaneous ONNV0804 infection. These findings suggest that ONNV0804 infection in macaques is a promising model for studying ONNV pathogenesis and immunity. This model will be instrumental for evaluating future vaccine and therapeutic candidates aimed at preventing ONNV infection and related viral disease.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2025

A Zika Virus-Like Particle Vaccine Mitigates Early Pregnancy Loss In Rhesus Macaques

Zika virus (ZIKV) is an arthropod-borne Orthoflavivirus that caused a major outbreak in the Americas in 2015-16. In Brazil, up to 46% of ZIKV positive pregnancies resulted in congenital Zika syndrome (CZS). CZS is characterized by a wide range of neurologic birth defects and miscarriage in up to 7.6% of affected pregnancies. With no current licensed ZIKV vaccines, we sought to evaluate a Zika virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine candidate in a rhesus macaque (RM) pregnancy model. VLPs were produced in mammalian cells expressing the pre-membrane-envelope region of the Asian-lineage ZIKV strain PRVABC59, which belongs to the Asian ZIKV lineage that is associated with outbreaks of congenital disease. To evaluate vaccine protection against adverse pregnancy complications, two cohorts of female RM were vaccinated with ZIKV-VLP with adjuvant Alhydrogel (alum) or adjuvant alone prior to mating. At gestational day (GD) 30 (early first trimester), pregnant animals were challenged with ZIKV-DAK 41524, an African-lineage strain shown to induce 1st-trimester fetal demise in 78% (n=11/14 animals) of RM, making it an ideal and stringent model for evaluating ZIKV vaccines. Within the vaccinated cohort, 2 of 3 animals reached the study endpoint of GD 90 with no observed adverse pregnancy outcomes. The third animal experienced pregnancy loss at GD 49 (18 d post infection), although no infectious virus was detected in placental or fetal tissues. In the unvaccinated cohort, two animals had severe adverse events. One animal experienced preterm labor, and another developed early-onset hydrops fetalis with widespread ZIKV-RNA detected via RNAscope and extensive placental damage. These results confirm a significant risk for early pregnancy loss in RM infected with ZIKV-DAK 41524. This model can be further used to understand the complexities of placental immunological features underlying stillbirth and miscarriage following infection. Our findings indicate that this ZIKV-VLP vaccine candidate protected pregnant macaques against fetal demise associated with highly pathogenic ZIKV challenge. Author SummaryZika virus (ZIKV) infection during pregnancy is associated with pregnancy loss, severe birth defects, including microcephaly and developmental delays, and other subtle neurologic changes. Although vaccine development efforts have been ongoing since the 2015/2016 ZIKV outbreak, no approved vaccine is currently available. Many existing studies have tested vaccines in animal models using strains such as ZIKV-PR that cause mild or moderate pregnancy complications at similar rates to human cases. Using challenge strains that only cause mild, or moderate pregnancy complications makes it difficult to rigorously evaluate vaccine efficacy. In this study, we tested a virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine, a safe and effective method for use during pregnancy as it is replication-deficient and only contains viral structural antigens. We found that the VLP vaccine, when paired with an adjuvant (alum), induced strong antibody responses in mice and controlled viral dissemination following challenge in nonpregnant macaques. To evaluate the protective efficacy of the ZIKV-VLP vaccine against in utero infection and disease, we used a stringent model of ZIKV infection during early pregnancy in rhesus macaques that is associated with high rates of fetal demise. In pregnant macaques, the vaccine reduced maternal viremia, limited viral spread to fetal and placental tissues, and conferred protection against virus-mediated fetal demise and placental damage. This is the first study to evaluate a VLP-based vaccine in a consistent pregnancy loss model of ZIKV infection. These findings support the continued development of VLP vaccines as a safe and effective strategy for protecting pregnant individuals and their developing fetuses from ZIKV.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2021

Virus-Dependent Immune Conditioning of Tissue Microenvironments

A thorough understanding of complex spatial host-disease interactions in situ is necessary in order to develop effective preventative measures and therapeutic strategies. Here, we developed Protein And Nucleic acid IN situ Imaging (PANINI) and coupled it with Multiplexed Ion Beam Imaging (MIBI) to sensitively and simultaneously quantify DNA, RNA, and protein levels within the microenvironments of tissue compartments. The PANINI-MIBI approach was used to measure over 30 parameters simultaneously across large sections of archival lymphoid tissues from non-human primates that were healthy or infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a model that accurately recapitulates human immunodeficiency virus infection (HIV). This enabled multiplexed dissection of cellular phenotypes, functional markers, viral DNA integration events, and viral RNA transcripts as resulting from viral infection. The results demonstrated immune coordination from an unexpected upregulation of IL10 in B cells in response to SIV infection that correlated with macrophage M2 polarization, thus conditioning a potential immunosuppressive environment that allows for viral production. This multiplexed imaging strategy also allowed characterization of the coordinated microenvironment around latently or actively infected cells to provide mechanistic insights into the process of viral latency. The spatial multi-modal framework presented here is applicable to deciphering tissue responses in other infectious diseases and tumor biology.

immunology↗

bioRxiv2019

Monodelphis domestica as a fetal intra-cerebral inoculation model for Zika virus pathogenesis

Monodelphis domestica, also known as the laboratory opossum, is a marsupial native to South America. At birth, these animals are developmentally equivalent to human embryos at approximately 5 weeks of gestation which, when coupled with other characteristics including the size of the animals, the development of a robust immune system during juvenile development, and the relative ease of experimental manipulation, have made M. domestica a valuable model in many areas of biomedical research. However, their suitability as models for infectious diseases, especially diseases caused by viruses such as Zika virus (ZIKV), is currently unknown. Here, we describe the replicative effects of ZIKV using a fetal intra-cerebral model of inoculation. Using immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization, we found that opossum embryos and fetuses are susceptible to infection by ZIKV administered intra-cerebrally, that the infection persists long term, and that the infection and viral replication consistently results in neural pathology and may occasionally result in global growth restriction. These results demonstrate the utility of M. domestica as a new animal model for investigating ZIKV infection in vivo. This new model will facilitate further inquiry into viral pathogenesis, particularly for those viruses that are neurotropic, that may require a host with the ability to support sustained viral infection, and/or that may require intra-cerebral inoculations of large numbers of embryos or fetuses.\n\nAUTHOR SUMMARYHere we show that the laboratory opossum (Monodelphis domestica) is a valuable new model for studying Zika virus pathogenesis. Newborns are at the developmental stage of 5-week human embryos. Zika virus inoculated on a single occasion into the brains of pups at the human developmental stages of 8-20 weeks post conception replicated in neuronal cells and persisted as a chronic infection until the experimental endpoint at 74-days post infection. In addition, we observed global growth restriction in one of 16 inoculated animals; global growth restriction has been observed in humans and other animal models infected with Zika virus. The results illustrate great potential for this new animal model for high throughput research on the neurological effects of Zika virus infection of embryos and fetuses.

pathology↗

bioRxiv2019

GUN1 regulates tetrapyrrole biosynthesis

The biogenesis of the photosynthetic apparatus in developing chloroplasts requires the assembly of proteins encoded on both nuclear and chloroplast genomes1. To co-ordinate this process there needs to be communication between these organelles, and while we have a good understanding of how the nucleus controls chloroplast development, how the chloroplast communicates with the nucleus at this time is still essentially unknown2. What we do know comes from pioneering work in which a series of genomes uncoupled (gun) mutants were identified that show elevated nuclear gene expression after chloroplast damage3. Of the six reported gun mutations, five are in tetrapyrrole biosynthesis proteins4-6 and this has led to the development of a model for chloroplast-to-nucleus retrograde signaling in which ferrochelatase 1 (FC1)-dependent heme synthesis generates a positive signal promoting expression of photosynthesis-related genes6. However, the molecular consequences of the strongest of the gun mutants, gun17, is unknown, preventing the development of a unifying hypothesis for chloroplast-to-nucleus signaling. Here, we show that GUN1 directly binds to heme and other metal-porphyrins, affects flux through the tetrapyrrole biosynthesis pathway and can increase the chelatase activity of FC1. These results raise the possibility that the signaling role of GUN1 may be manifested through changes in tetrapyrrole metabolism and supports a role for tetrapyrroles as mediators of a single biogenic chloroplast-to-nucleus retrograde signaling pathway.

plant biology↗