Leave no stone unturned. Seriously please turn them or they’re gonna get bedsores. Come on Janet this is rock nursing 101, get it together. This is gonna be on your test.
In today’s news: COVID-19 immunity studies in monkeys and a tiny little bee nibbles.
COVID-19 Update
SARS-CoV-2 Immunity in Macaques
Two recent studies, both published in Science, have studied and demonstrated capability for COVID-19 immunity in macaques.
In the first study, researchers infected 9 rhesus macaques with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and tested them for both viral load and immune response to confirm that they had indeed thoroughly contracted the virus and verified symptoms to see that the monkeys had indeed developed disease as a result of infection. They found that viral load typically peaked around day 2, and in all cases, infection was resolved or was undetectable after 28 days. After 35 days, the researchers re-infected the macaques with the virus and found that they showed significantly lower viral loads and that the virus was completely undetectable after a week. None of the viral loads in any of the re-infected macaques were significant enough to cause disease a second time. The researchers also found immune response signals in both the macaques’ cells and bodily fluids that suggest that the significantly lower viral load was because of mediation by the monkeys’ immune system. Given all of this, the researchers concluded that the recovery from COVID-19 infection provided near-complete protection from the disease, and that protection, in this case, was due to immune control.
The second study, out of Harvard Medical School, tested a variety of candidate vaccines in a group of 35 macaques. The different vaccines—all different iterations of a nucleic acid vaccine that you can read more about in a previous post here—were all constructed to replicate the SARS-CoV-2 virus’ Spike protein in different forms. The researchers tested these vaccine candidates by immunizing 25 of the monkeys while 10 were left unvaccinated. The team found that all of the vaccinated macaques showed immune responses similar to those seen in both macaques and human patients who have recovered from COVID-19. The team also found that when the macaques were later inoculated with the virus, all of them showed viral loads almost exactly comparable to the reduced virus levels seen in the macaques who had been reintroduced to the virus after recovering from infection in the previous study.
In both studies, though the macaques showed near-complete protection against infection (in the vaccinated monkeys’ case) and re-infection (in the convalescent monkeys’ case), neither study showed the macaques developed sterilizing immunity, i.e. complete protection against infection. This is different from protective immunity, where the virus may infect the host, but immune system controls are strong enough to prevent the virus from establishing itself enough to cause disease. In sterilizing immunity, the virus is immunologically prevented from infecting the host at all, and thus cannot be transmitted from the host.
The team cautioned, however, that infection and immune protection in monkeys and humans is different in a variety of ways, and that more research would need to be done to see if these findings hold true in human patients. In the latter study, however, the researchers were able to define the concentration baseline of neutralizing antibodies in the macaques’ blood that granted effective immunity. If this baseline ends up being applicable in other non-human primates and humans, that could help speed up the development of COVID-19 vaccines for human populations.
Hongry Bumbwebeez
I’m so sorry for that heading but the beez are hongry and we need to talk about it. A new study out yesterday in Science has shown that bumblebees will cut flower leaves with their wittle bee mouths to get the plants to flower earlier when the sweet wittle chubby babies are feeling a wittle hungry for fwower powwen (I’m done now I promise.)
While studying the habits of worker bumblebees, the researchers behind the study noticed that the bees were periodically biting into the leaves of plants, and decided to look more into whether they were eating the leaves or trying to gather nest materials from them, or if something else was behind the curious nibbling. To test this, the researchers put the bees together with plants in a controlled cage and left another set of plants bee-less. The bees soon started going at the plant leaves making little incisions, and the researchers mimicked this in the control set of plants by making little scissor cuts in their leaves. The team found that both sets of plants bloomed earlier than they normally would, but the bee-cut plants much more so, finding that plants with leaves punctured by the bumblebees bloomed up to 30 days sooner than normal, leading the team to speculate that either something in the bees’ saliva or a particular method to their cutting might be accelerating this rapid flowering in plants, though more research will need to be done to confirm.
Credit: Hannier Pulido, De Moraes and Mescher Laboratories
The team also released the bees out of the laboratory and found that the effect held true for wild flowering plants as well, and that the amount of leaf damage the bees caused varied based on pollen and flower availability. Though it makes sense that the bees would develop this behavior to make pollen more readily available in times of scarcity, given that worker bees don’t usually live long enough to benefit from this early flowering tactic, more research will need to be done on the behavior and how it influences resource availability to bumblebee colonies to confirm that it was an evolved trait. Although given that the researchers also noticed the pollen-inducing bites in various other bumblebee species—as well as the fact that pollen availability and behaviors that control it affect bumblebee nests as a whole and thus could put natural selection pressure on the queen that does all of the reproducing—the researchers think it’s likely that this flower jump-start nibbling could be an evolved behavior.
And that’s it y’all! In today’s personal news:….honestly there’s no news. Nothin new, nothin changed, same old shit, same old FU-CKIN shit. Things are good though, got a good quarantine rhythm down. Things here in LA are slowly opening back up, which is great but also bittersweet because I’m sure people are gonna act a total fool, but whatever. Also, I feel like I’m in this pattern where I’m good for a week, then the next week gets slightly worse until I have a mini-mental breakdown for like an hour, and then I’m back to being good again. It’s basically my new cycle. Thank god for therapy or I’m sure my mini-crises would be weekly at best, or I’d just be living in one long neverending mental breakdown. Seriously thank GOD for therapy. Also, my cat’s out of his cone! Happy day! He’s stoked, he’s been having a ball. He’s a new man. Honestly he’s thriving in quarantine. He’s an inspiration tbh.
Anyways bye nerds! Love ya, stay safe, be well, wear a face mask xoxo