On his blog Zika Diaries, Dr. Vincent Racaniello writes: Zika and enterovirus D68. Excerpt:
Enterovirus D68 is classified in the picornavirus family, and shares features with both polioviruses (which cause paralysis but not respiratory disease) and rhinoviruses (which cause respiratory disease but not paralysis). Like human rhinoviruses, EV-D68 initiates infection in the the respiratory tract, but not the intestinal mucosa like poliovirus. Transmission of EV-D68 is by respiratory aerosols (like rhinoviruses), not faecal-oral contamination as for poliovirus. Unlike poliovirus, EV-D68 has not been found in the stool of infected patients.
Although EV-D68 infection has been associated with paralysis in young children, it is not clear if the virus is responsible for this condition. Therefore it is important to determine if EV-D68 is neurovirulent—if it is able to replicate in and destroy neural cells. Until recently we had no clear path to answering this question.
Our work on Zika virus has lead to the establishment of two different systems in our laboratory for studying viral neurovirulence. I previously described our finding that Zika virus can replicate in human cortical neurons produced from human embryonic stem cells. I’ve also described our use of embryonic mice to determine if Zika virus can infect the brain. Both systems could be used to study EV-D68 neurovirulence.
That’s how a research laboratory should work: progress made on one project (Zika virus) can be used to advance our understanding of a different virus (EV-D68). Even though our laboratory is small, we can work on two very different viruses because the experimental approaches are similar.
