BIOL368/F20:Class Journal Week 11

Anna Horvath Response

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • The journal club article we read was about neutralizing antibodies in Syrian hamsters. This research could potentially lead to the development of a vaccine. As this article spoke about using a small animal model, I would be curious to know whether other small animal models used in this type of study exhbitied the same response. The article found that there was low neutralization with the S protein, but a moderate amount with RBD+S and RBD. Ultimately, RBD-A nAbs were able to compete with ACE2. The study found that Abs are targeted to the place that overlaps with the ACE2 binding site. I would be curious to know whether other studies have seen similar results. If they have, how does this help in the development of a more effective vaccine?

Anna Horvath (talk) 10:22, 19 November 2020 (PST)

Yaniv Maddahi Response

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • Our journal club article for this week was about different mutations that can occur among strains of SARS-CoV-2, with regard to both amino acid and glycosylation sites. The article noted that some mutations resulted in increased infectivity as well as resistivity to antibodies. As such, I believe it would be interesting to see how interactions among the viruses of varying degrees of mutation interact with ACE as well as antibodies. I am curious about this for two reasons: first, I would like to visualize how the mutations incase binding strength and how they confer a resistivity to the antibodies. Secondly, I would like to visualize this to possibly further find a mechanism to actually terminate the virus.

Yaniv Maddahi (talk) 16:48, 18 November 2020 (PST)

Nathan R. Beshai

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • Something that I was curious about regarding the journal club article is how the SARS-CoV-1 fitness progressed and how that relates to how the SARS-CoV-2 fitness is progressing. As both shares around 75 percent of the spike protein, I was curious as to how SARS-CoV-1 progressed which might give us insight into how SARS-CoV-2 can mutate. Something that is interesting is how when SARS-CoV-1 was re-introduced to the population it was not as easily spread as it was during the first outbreak. This means that its variants were not as successful-fitness wise. However, the G614 variant had an increased viral load on the patient and other consequences.

Nathan R. Beshai (talk) 22:42, 18 November 2020 (PST)

JT Correy

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • I think looking at the immune response side of SARS-CoV-2 is really interesting. Most of the research have done so far has been very isolated to the spike protein/ACE2 so I think “zooming out” to see the bigger picture would be interesting. The paper we just did for our journal club focused on 12 different monoclonal antibodies and I think it would be really interesting to further investigate the antibody response and how they work.

Jcorrey (talk) 23:41, 18 November 2020 (PST)

Aiden Burnett Response

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • How similar are human and syrian hamster ACE2 RBD? The antibody that they found was able to combat SARS-CoV-2 infection did so by interacting with this structure, and so their similarity may have important implications for vaccine research based on these findings.

Aiden Burnett (talk) 01:08, 19 November 2020 (PST)

Fatimah Alghanem

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • from our journal club paper this week, I learned about mutations in SARS-Cov-2 that could result in the virus inactivity. therefore it makes me wonder about looking further into the possibility of other mutations that would result in the inactivity of SARS-Cov-2.

Falghane (talk) 05:04, 19 November 2020 (PST)

Owen Dailey

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • I would like to track the D614G mutation in a specific geographic area. So far, we have only looked at the D614G mutation on a global scale, but I think it would be cool to see one specific population transition from D614 to G614, and find out how long that takes. Additionally, I might want to do more research on the other mutations that arise with D614G.

Owen R. Dailey (talk) 09:43, 19 November 2020 (PST)

Macie Duran Response

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • After reading our journal, I am very interested in learning more about the human body’s immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Their findings on the 13 mAbs tested could be used to explore the development of therapeutic antibodies, as they appeared to have different inhibitory effects on the spike protein variants. They also found that glycosylation sites can impact viral infectivity and antigenicity, so it would be interesting to see how glycan can affect the vaccine-induced immune response to SARS-CoV-2.

(Macie Duran (talk) 09:48, 19 November 2020 (PST))

Nida Patel Response

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • The article we chose was about using Syrian Hamster models to isolate neutralizing antibodies. Antibody study is essential in vaccine curation, As they utilize small animal models, like Syrian hamsters we would like to further our knowledge on why hamsters are a successful model to depict symptoms of SARS-CoV-2.

Taylor Makela Response

1. What are you wondering about regarding the journal club article that might become the basis for your final research project?
   • After reading, reviewing, and summarizing our selected article, I am wondering how similar the ACE2 receptor for SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-2 neutralizing antibodies are in humans versus Syrian Hamsters.

Taylor Makela (talk) 03:20, 25 January 2021 (PST)