The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) has had a significant impact on global health. The high transmissibility and pathogenicity of the virus has led to significant advances in research in recent years, including major breakthroughs in vaccine development, treatment options, understanding transmission and the emergence of new variants. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is an RNA virus from the Betacoronavirus family, consisting of the structural proteins M, N, S, E, non-structural and accessory proteins. It enters the host cells via the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 and begins to multiply there. The cells, on the other hand, are equipped with mechanisms that enable them to quickly recognize viruses and react to them. These mechanisms include cytokines and apolipoprotein B mRNA editing catalytic polypeptide-like proteins (APOBEC), which begin to express at an accelerated rate as part of the immune response to infection, and are involved in virus inactivation.
In the master thesis, we wanted to investigate how the overexpression of SARS-CoV-2 structural proteins M, N, S, E affects the expression of cytokines and APOBEC3 proteins in the A549 and Huh-7 cell lines.
Appropriately prepared cells were first transfected with plasmids containing SARS-CoV-2 gene sequences of structural, accessory and control proteins. After 48 hours, an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay was performed for the presence of IL-6 cytokines in the cell medium. mRNA was isolated from the transfected cells and transcribed into more stable complementary DNA by reverse transcription. Finally, we obtained quantitative gene expression results for individual cytokines and APOBEC3 proteins by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction.
We found that in Huh-7 cells, the mRNA expression of cytokines IL-8 and TNF-α, as well as A3B and A3F proteins was most strongly increased by the cell-mediated intake of structural proteins S, E and M. The effect of ORF6 accessory protein in A549 cells indicates a correlation between the expression of cytokines and APOBEC proteins, and the ELISA assay showed no increased IL-6 cytokine excretion in supernatants of test cell samples.
From our results, we conclude that structural proteins S, E and M influence the increased expression of cytokines and APOBEC proteins and induce an immune response.
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