Remite: Rubén Piacentini
Los nanotubos pueden proporcionar una respuesta astuta al misterio de cómo el virus que causa el COVID infecta las neuronas y produce síntomas neurológicos duraderos
Scientific American
As familiar to everyone as the COVID-causing coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has become over the past two years, feverish research is still trying to parse a lingering puzzle. How, in fact, does the pandemic virus that has so changed the world cross over into the brain after entering the respiratory system? An answer is important because neurological complaints are some of the most common in the constellation of symptoms called long COVID. The mystery centers around the fact that brain cells don’t display the receptors, or docking sites, that the virus uses to get into nasal and lung cells.
SARS-CoV-2, though, may have come up with an ingenious work-around. It may completely do away with the molecular maneuverings needed to attach to and unlock a cell membrane. Instead it wields a blunt instrument in the form of nanotube “bridges”—cylinders constructed of the common protein actin that are no more than a few tens of nanometers in diameter. These tunneling nanotubes extend across cell-to-cell gaps to penetrate a neighbor and give viral particles a direct route into COVID-impervious tissue. Researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Paris demonstrated the prospects for a nanotube-mediated cell crossing in a study in a lab dish that now needs to be confirmed in infected human patients. Given further proof, the findings could explain why some people who get COVID-19 experience brain fog and other neurological symptoms. Also, if the intercellular conduits could be severed, that might prevent some of these debilitating aftereffects of infection.
The nanotube route “is a shortcut that propagates infection fast and between different organs, permissive or not permissive, to the infection,” says Chiara Zurzolo, a cell biologist at the Pasteur Institute, who conducted the study. “And it might be also a way for the virus to hide and escape the immune response.” Read more…