United States: New research has explained how the Ebola virus is able to penetrate different layers of human skin to make direct contact transmission possible.
Understanding Ebola’s Transmission
Ebola, sometimes referred to as Ebola fever, is a lethal hemorrhagic illness from a virus prevalent in some regions of East-Central and West Africa. Although it is common to know that the virus is transmitted through contact with the affected person’s body products, new outbreaks, including the one that occurred in West Africa in 2013-2016, have shown that the virus might also spread in other ways. Surprise, the Ebola virus has been detected on the outermost layer of the skin, those in the advanced stages of EBOV or the dead body. However, the further route of the intracellular virus from inside of the skin’s outer layers to the skin surface is still not well understood, as reported by SciTechDaily.
Newly published study, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Iowa Health Care, Am, Texas Biomedical Research Institute, San, Boston University Path(the cellular pathway that EBOV uses to cross the different layers of skin to get to the exterior skin layer). The study also established the skin cell types that are infected by the virus and showed that human skin plays a role in the infection of EBOV. In a study that appears in Science Advances today (January 1), the scientists state that the skin poses a possible means of direct transmission of the virus between individuals.
Role of Skin Cells in Ebola Transmission
“The skin is the largest organ in the human body yet is woefully understudied compared to most other organs. Interactions of EBOV with skin cells have not previously been extensively examined,” says Wendy Maury, PhD, UI professor of microbiology and immunology and senior author of the study. “Our work provides evidence for one mechanistic avenue that EBOV uses to exit from the human body. A comprehensive understanding of which cells are targeted during virus infection is critical for rational development of antiviral approaches.”
Molecular Biology Techniques Elucidate EBOV Pathophysiology
A new method to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus using skin cells was established by the led research group by Maury and Kelly Messingham, PhD, a research professor of dermatology at the University of Iowa. To generate a human skin explant system, they obtained full-thickness skin biopsies from healthy people, thereby including both dermal and epidermal skin layers.
To investigate the intracellular arrangement of the Ebola virus and its interaction with the skin cells, the explants were positioned dermal side down in culture media, while the virus particles were applied to the media to simulate the process of egress of the virus from the blood to the keratinocytes at the surface of the skin. To characterize the temporal progression and the individual infected cell dynamics, the researchers employed virus-tracing and cell-tagging methods to track the movement of the virus across the skin layers and reached the upper-most layer of the epidermis.
Identifying Key Cells in Ebola Infection
Prior human and animal research works were able to show that cells in the skin were infected by EBOV, but the cells that possessed those affected were unknown.
In this new study, the authors demonstrated that EBOV infected several types of cells in skin explants, such as macrophages, endothelial cells, fibroblasts, and keratinocytes. Although some of these cell types are also found to be infected by EBOV in other organs, it has been previously shown that keratinocytes, which are the cells of the dermis layer of the skin only, support EBOV infection.
Recommendations for Future Research And Therapy
Notably, the viral replication was even higher in the epidermal layer than dermal layers when the tissues were expressed per gram. Moreover, the infectious virus was identified on the epidermal surface by the third day, which shows that the virus quickly disseminates and migrates through the explants to the outer layer of skin.
The researchers also demonstrated that human skin explants can be used as three-dimensional organs to evaluate the antiviral effectiveness of EBOV, a valuable, useful, and inexpensive model for therapeutic assessment, as reported by SciTechDaily.
Conclusive Remarks
Lastly, the team worked on the relations between EBOV and two distinct skin-derived cells – fibroblasts and keratinocytes where the team also pinpointed receptors on both the types of cells that facilitated the entry of the Ebola virus.