Publications by authors named "Nicolette Arndt"
Article Synopsis
- Researchers studied the Makona strain of the Ebola virus to explore its genetic diversity and any potential effects on its ability to cause disease and spread among humans.
- Despite finding various mutations during the outbreak, particularly in key viral proteins, these mutations did not show significant differences in how the virus affected laboratory mice and rhesus macaques.
- Ultimately, the study indicated that these genetic changes did not lead to identifiable variations in disease severity or virus shedding among the different EBOV-Makona isolates tested.
Lethal Zika Virus Disease Models in Young and Older Interferon α/β Receptor Knock Out Mice.
Front Cell Infect Microbiol
April 2019
The common small animal disease models for Zika virus (ZIKV) are mice lacking the interferon responses, but infection of interferon receptor α/β knock out (IFNAR) mice is not uniformly lethal particularly in older animals. Here we sought to advance this model in regard to lethality for future countermeasure efficacy testing against more recent ZIKV strains from the Asian lineage, preferably the American sublineage. We first infected IFNAR mice subcutaneously with the contemporary ZIKV-Paraiba strain resulting in predominantly neurological disease with ~50% lethality.
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