Nosedive: Poor Nasal Antiviral Responses Linked to Severe COVID
Those with mild symptoms manage to keep the coronavirus out of the lower airways
Talking, singing, coughing-all of these can spread COVID-19 from an infected person via respiratory aerosols. These tiny droplets, once inhaled, enter the respiratory system, where the SARS-CoV-2 virus latches onto cell surface receptors and begins to wreak havoc. Many COVID-19 patients present with symptoms that are restricted to the upper respiratory tract. However, those with more severe, life-threatening infections often end up with lasting damage to the lungs.
This phenomenon led researchers to hypothesize that immune events occurring in the nasal passageway may influence the severity of COVID-19 symptoms.
In a study published in the journal , researchers at the University of Mississippi Medical Center took nasal swabs from 58 participants, 35 of whom were COVID-19 patients. The team isolated cells from the swabs and performed single-cell sequencing on them to create individual transcriptomic profiles that were grouped depending on the severity of the patients’ experienced.
“Our single-cell sequencing approaches allow us to comprehensively study the body’s response to disease at a specific moment in time,” explained team member Alex Shalek from the Ragon Institute. “This gives…
