PULLMAN, Wash. — Researchers are hoping that by solving the mystery of why bats can harbor viruses like hantavirus and coronavirus — pathogens that are highly dangerous to humans — without becoming ill themselves, they might also find the answer to preventing outbreaks and fighting the diseases.
Washington State University molecular virologist Michael Letko led the team studying how bats and their immune systems respond to these viruses.
“Bats are a reservoir for many pathogens that can infect humans and domestic animals, yet we lack effective tools to study bat viruses in the lab,” said Letko, an assistant professor in WSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “One big question is how do bats tolerate these infections? These cell lines and future research can help us uncover those mechanisms, and that could lead to new therapies for human diseases.”
According to the study published by WSU, “A cell line is a population of cells that are cultured and maintained in a laboratory for research purposes. These cells are typically derived from a single original cell and go through a process known as immortalization, which allows them to be grown and divided indefinitely under controlled conditions, making them a valuable tool for viral research.”
Most labs have been limited to using cell lines developed more than 50 years ago, limiting their usefulness. Therefore, new lines were developed from kidney tissue of a Seba’s short-tailed bat (Carollia perspicillata) that came from a colony at WSU Vancouver.
The new lines will be particularly useful for studying coronaviruses and orthohantaviruses. The orthohantaviruses family includes sin nombre virus, which is found in the western United States and recently caused a fatal infection in Whitman County, Washington.
“These viruses have the potential to impact not just our own national health, but global health, because they’re found all over,” Letko said.
The study outlines one major challenge to developing useful lines — ensuring the cells maintain their ability to mount immune responses to pathogens.
“We started off with a pile of different tissues and cells, and then we went through different immortalization routes and basically started to weed them out,” Letko said. “By the end, we had a small number of cells that were immortalized in specific ways, and those were the ones that actually still retained the properties we think are going to let us study how bats actually respond to viruses.”
Much of the research thus far has relied on cell lines from humans, rodents, or primates, which won’t answer why bats tolerate viruses that make other species sick.
“We could study a virus like Ebola just fine in a human cell, and we can watch how it interacts with that immune system,” Letko said, “but that won’t help us identify the reason why bats tolerate these infections.”
According to WSU, while some bat lines have been developed in private labs, those are not often made available to other researchers. Letko wanted to ensure their work would aid future research.
“We have a lot of really good immunologists and virologists here and elsewhere, but they just don’t have access to all this specialized material,” Letko said. “That creates tiers in bat research between the groups that have access and basically everybody else who had to rely on old cell lines that were collected in the 1960s.”
To learn more, visit the WSU Insider website.
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