Research Highlights

Yunjeong Kim and Kyeong-Ok "KC" Chang, virologists in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Kansas State University, have published a study showing a possible therapeutic treatment for COVID-19.

Pathogenic coronaviruses are a major threat to global public health, as shown by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus, or SARS-CoV; Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus, known as MERS-CoV; and the newly emerged SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 infection.

The study, "3C-like protease inhibitors block coronavirus replication in vitro and improve survival in MERS-CoV-infected mice," appears in the Aug. 3 issue of the prestigious medical journal Science Translational Medicine. It reveals how small molecule protease inhibitors show potency against human coronaviruses. These coronavirus 3C-like proteases, known as 3CLpro, are strong therapeutic targets because they play vital roles in coronavirus replication.

"Vaccine developments and treatments are the biggest targets in COVID-19 research, and treatment is really key," said Chang, professor of diagnostic medicine and pathobiology. "This paper describes protease inhibitors targeting coronavirus 3CLpro, which is a well-known therapeutic target."

The study demonstrates that this series of optimized coronavirus 3CLpro inhibitors blocked replication of the human coronaviruses MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2 in cultured cells and in a mouse model for MERS. These findings suggest that this series of compounds should be investigated further as a potential therapeutic for human coronavirus infection.

Read the full story from Kansas State University here.

Hospitals around the world are treating COVID-19 patients with plasma drawn from people who have recovered from the infections in hopes that their antibodies will bind to and neutralize the virus.

But in a recent study University of New Mexico researchers identify potentially serious shortcomings in the use of so-called “convalescent” plasma, reporting that none of 12 patients at UNM Hospital who received the treatment appeared to benefit from it.

“We stopped after we enrolled 13 patients [in the study] after we got some of the data back showing that most of the convalescent plasma had little to no neutralizing antibodies in it and it actually didn’t help them improve their antibody levels,” said Michelle Harkins, MD, division chief of Pulmonary, Critical Care & Sleep Medicine.

The paper, accepted online this week by the Journal of Infectious Diseases, reflects a unique collaboration between her division, the Division of Infectious Diseases and the UNM Center for Global Health, Harkins said.

Read the full story from University of New Mexico here.

A study published in the journal nature has given further supportive evidence that SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes covid-19, can be transmitted by air or through surfaces. The study revealed environmental contamination of surface and air samples with the virus in places where covid-19 positive patients were isolated.

University of Nebraska Medical Center conducted the study in association with National Strategic Research Institute USA. During the initial isolation of 13 individuals with Covid-19 at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, the researchers collected air and surface samples to examine viral shedding from isolated individuals.

The researchers said they detected viral contamination among all samples, supporting the use of airborne isolation precautions when caring for covid-19 patients.

The study has highlighted that as the pandemic progressed, a continued paucity of evidence on routes of SARS-CoV-2 transmission has resulted in shifting infection prevention and control guidelines between classically-defined airborne and droplet precautions.

Read the full story from Livemint here.

UNH researchers have identified new pathways in an RNA-based virus where inhibitors, like medical treatments, unbind. The finding could be beneficial in understanding how these inhibitors react and potentially help develop a new generation of drugs to target viruses with high death rates, like HIV-1, Zika, Ebola and SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

“When we first started this research, we never anticipated that we’d be in the midst of a pandemic caused by an RNA virus,” said Harish Vashisth, associate professor of chemical engineering. “But as these types of viruses emerge our findings will hopefully offer an enhanced understanding of how viral RNAs interact with inhibitors and be used to design better treatments.”

Similar to how humans are made up of a series of different chromosomes, known as DNA, many viruses have a genetic makeup of RNA molecules. These RNA-based genomes contain potential sites where inhibitors can attach and deactivate the virus. Part of the challenge in drug development can be fluctuations in the viral genome that may prevent the inhibitors from attaching.

In their paper, recently published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, the researchers looked specifically at an RNA fragment from the HIV-1 virus and its interaction with a ligand/inhibitor, a complex compound that is known to interfere with the virus replication process.

Read the full article from University of New Hampshire here.

Could the cure for melanoma -- the most dangerous type of skin cancer -- be a compound derived from a marine invertebrate that lives at the bottom of the ocean? National Science Foundation-funded scientists led by Alison Murray of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada, think so.

They're looking to the microbiome of an Antarctic ascidian called Synoicum adareanum to better understand the possibilities for development of a melanoma-specific drug.

Ascidians, or "sea squirts," are primitive, sac-like marine animals that live attached to ocean bottoms around the world and feed on plankton by filtering seawater.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences have developed a long-lasting spray that disinfects surfaces for extended periods, even in heavy use, and is less likely to transmit infectious diseases.

The spray was developed by a team that includes professor Jamie Hestekin and doctoral student John Moore, both in chemical engineering at the U of A, as well as professor Peter Crooks and postdoctoral fellow Soma Shekar Dachavaram, both from UAMS. The original development of this work came from an NSF Epscor Track 1 project led by Min Zou, professor of mechanical engineering, and Steve Stanley from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.

Hestekin said the product is unique because the application happens in one spray step and uses a process known as “click chemistry” to combine nano-sized cellulose and antiseptic agents. Those agents create compounds with antibacterial and antiviral properties that attach on to the surface and develop into films through an auto-assembly process.

The technology is patent-pending, and researchers were recently awarded a $194,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support the work. In that project, researchers work with Christa Hestekin, an associate professor who holds the Ansel and Virginia Condray Endowed Professorship in Chemical Engineering, on virus identification and destruction. The project has also been supported by the University of Arkansas Chancellor’s Commercialization Fund.

Researchers plan to use green dye in the spray material, so a person would know, for example, that it was safe to touch a doorknob as long as it appeared green. When the knob returns to its original color, it would be an indication to reapply.

The spray could also be sprayed over the top of packages in distribution centers, without damaging them, to better protect employees and consumers, researchers said.

The research represents an important step in the COVID-19 recovery process, Hestekin said.

“When the current lockdowns end, there will be a need for the public to feel safe going out again,” he said. “Since it is known that COVID-19 can survive a significant amount of time on surfaces, a surface coating that works on doorknobs, countertops, etc., is needed to make the public feel safe touching these surfaces without risk of being infected.”

Read the full story from University of Arkansas here.

The end of spring is usually the time to assess the annual Mount Everest climbing season, but this year, because of COVID-19, the mountain was unusually quiet. Nepal banned all expeditions on its side. China banned foreign mountaineers but allowed Chinese nationals to climb from the Tibet side, including a team of surveyors attempting to remeasure the mountain’s height in the wake of the 2015 earthquake.

But while most of the climbing world took a break from Everest, a group of scientists in labs spread across Europe, the U.S., and Nepal have been working on the mountain “remotely”—analyzing a trove of ice, snow, water, and sediment samples they collected last spring as part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition. The project's goal was to turn the world’s highest mountain into a giant climate laboratory.

During April and May last year, a multi-disciplinary team of more than 30 biologists, glaciologists, geologists, meteorologists, and geographers fanned out across Everest’s southern flank, conducting fieldwork high on the mountain, as well as across the Khumbu Valley.“We believe the best way to do science on Everest isn’t just to do one kind of science, but do many kinds of science,” says Paul Mayewski of the University of Maine, the leader of the effort, which saw the National Geographic Society partner with Tribhuvan University and the Government of Nepal.

Each individual study promises a unique snapshot of the mountain’s climate—past, present, and future. Ice cores and lake sediment cores will provide a record of what the environment was like going back thousands of years. Snow and water samples give a look at what’s happening on the mountain, today, including the future of the glaciers, which serve as crucial water sources for large downstream populations. The team also installed a network of automated weather stations, which will document upcoming weather trends for years to come.

Read the full article from National Geographic here.

A team lead by MSU scientist Blake Wiedenheft was able to detect the novel coronavirus in samples taken at Bozeman's Water Reclamation Facility, which handles millions of gallons of wastewater produced each day by the city's roughly 50,000 residents. Seven sewage samples, taken during a 17-day period in March and April, revealed levels of the virus that tracked with a rise in the number of COVID-19 cases reported in the Bozeman area and then declined after state-mandated social distancing. That suggests that the wastewater measurements are a reliable indicator of the local prevalence of the disease, Wiedenheft said.

Because it's thought that individuals can be sick with COVID-19 and spread the disease for up to two weeks before showing symptoms, being able to detect increased levels of the virus in wastewater could help health officials make decisions about social distancing and other containment measures before a tide of sickened patients arrive at hospitals seeking testing and medical treatment, Wiedenheft noted.

At the end of April, Gallatin County — including Bozeman — had reported a total of 146 COVID-19 cases, suggesting that the MSU team's tests detected virus molecules from a relatively small number of infected individuals.

Read the full story from MSU here.

Given the present-day rate of global sea-level rise, remaining marshes in the Mississippi Delta are likely to drown, according to a new Tulane University study. A key finding of the study, published in Science Advances is that coastal marshes experience tipping points, where a small increase in the rate of sea-level rise leads to widespread submergence.

The loss of 2,000 square miles (5,000 km2) of wetlands in coastal Louisiana over the past century is well documented, but it has been more challenging to predict the fate of the remaining 6,000 square miles (15,000 km2) of marshland. The study used hundreds of sediment cores collected since the early 1990s to examine how marshes responded to a range of rates of sea-level rise during the past 8,500 years.

Renewable technologies are a promising solution for addressing global energy needs in a sustainable way. However, widespread adoption of renewable energy resources from solar, wind, biomass and more have lagged, in part because they are difficult to store and transport. As the search for materials to efficiently address these storage and transport needs continues, University of Delaware researchers from the Catalysis Center for Energy Innovation (CCEI) report new techniques for characterizing complex materials with the potential to overcome these challenges.

Currently technologies exist for characterizing highly ordered surfaces with specific repeating patterns, such as crystals. Describing surfaces with no repeating pattern is a harder problem. UD doctoral candidate and 2019-2020 Blue Waters Graduate Fellow Josh Lansford and Dion Vlachos, who directs both CCEI and the Delaware Energy Institute and is the Allan and Myra Ferguson Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, have developed a method to observe the local surface structure of atomic-scale particles in detail while simultaneously keeping the entire system in view.

The approach, which leverages machine learning, data science techniques and models grounded in physics, enables the researchers to visualize the actual three-dimensional structure of a material they are interested in up close, but also in context. This means they can study specific particles on the material’s surface, but also watch how the particle’s structure evolves — over time — in the presence of other molecules and under different conditions, such as temperature and pressure.

Put to use, the research team’s technique will help engineers and scientists identify materials that can improve storage technologies, such as fuel cells and batteries, which power our lives. Such improvements are necessary to help these important technologies reach their full potential and become more widespread.

Read the full story from University of Delaware here.