Host-derived oxidized phospholipids initiate effector-triggered immunity fostering lethality upon microbial encounter.

Macrophages detect invading microorganisms via pattern recognition receptors that recognize pathogen-associated molecular patterns, or via sensing the activity of virulence factors that initiates effector-triggered immunity (ETI). Tissue damage that follows pathogen encounter leads to the release of host-derived factors that participate to inflammation. How these self-derived molecules are sensed by macrophages and their impact on immunity remain poorly understood. Here we demonstrate that, in mice and humans, host-derived oxidized phospholipids (oxPLs) are formed upon microbial encounter. oxPL blockade restricts inflammation and prevents the death of the host, without affecting pathogen burden. Mechanistically, oxPLs bind and inhibit AKT, a master regulator of immunity and metabolism. AKT inhibition potentiates the methionine cycle, and epigenetically dampens Il10, a pluripotent anti-inflammatory cytokine. Overall, we found that host-derived inflammatory cues act as "self" virulence factors that initiate ETI and that their activity can be targeted to protect the host against excessive inflammation upon microbial encounter.

A pan-influenza antibody inhibiting neuraminidase via receptor mimicry.

Rapidly evolving influenza A viruses (IAVs) and influenza B viruses (IBVs) are major causes of recurrent lower respiratory tract infections. Current influenza vaccines elicit antibodies predominantly to the highly variable head region of haemagglutinin and their effectiveness is limited by viral drift1 and suboptimal immune responses2. Here we describe a neuraminidase-targeting monoclonal antibody, FNI9, that potently inhibits the enzymatic activity of all group 1 and group 2 IAVs, as well as Victoria/2/87-like, Yamagata/16/88-like and ancestral IBVs. FNI9 broadly neutralizes seasonal IAVs and IBVs, including the immune-evading H3N2 strains bearing an N-glycan at position 245, and shows synergistic activity when combined with anti-haemagglutinin stem-directed antibodies. Structural analysis reveals that D107 in the FNI9 heavy chain complementarity-determinant region 3 mimics the interaction of the sialic acid carboxyl group with the three highly conserved arginine residues (R118, R292 and R371) of the neuraminidase catalytic site. FNI9 demonstrates potent prophylactic activity against lethal IAV and IBV infections in mice. The unprecedented breadth and potency of the FNI9 monoclonal antibody supports its development for the prevention of influenza illness by seasonal and pandemic viruses.

Tonic TNF conditioning of macrophages safeguards stimulus-specific inflammatory responses.

Tumor necrosis factor (TNF) is a key inflammatory cytokine that warns recipient cells of a nearby infection or tissue damage. Acute exposure to TNF activates characteristic oscillatory dynamics of the transcription factor NFκB and induces a characteristic gene expression program; these are distinct from the responses of cells directly exposed to pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs). Here, we report that tonic TNF exposure is critical for safeguarding TNF's specific functions. In the absence of tonic TNF conditioning, acute exposure to TNF causes (i) NFκB signaling dynamics that are less oscillatory and more like PAMP-responsive NFκB dynamics, (ii) immune gene expression that is more similar to the Pam3CSK4 response program, and (iii) broader epigenomic reprogramming that is characteristic of PAMP-responsive changes. We show that the absence of tonic TNF signaling effects subtle changes to TNF receptor availability and dynamics such that enhanced pathway activity results in non-oscillatory NFκB. Our results reveal tonic TNF as a key tissue determinant of the specific cellular responses to acute paracrine TNF exposure, and their distinction from responses to direct exposure to PAMPs.

Dendritic spine loss in epileptogenic Type II focal cortical dysplasia: Role of enhanced classical complement pathway activation.

Dendritic spines are the postsynaptic sites for most excitatory glutamatergic synapses. We previously demonstrated a severe spine loss and synaptic reorganization in human neocortices presenting Type II focal cortical dysplasia (FCD), a developmental malformation and frequent cause of drug-resistant focal epilepsy. We extend the findings, investigating the potential role of complement components C1q and C3 in synaptic pruning imbalance. Data from Type II FCD were compared with those obtained in focal epilepsies with different etiologies. Neocortical tissues were collected from 20 subjects, mainly adults with a mean age at surgery of 31 years, admitted to epilepsy surgery with a neuropathological diagnosis of: cryptogenic, temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis, and Type IIa/b FCD. Dendritic spine density quantitation, evaluated in a previous paper using Golgi impregnation, was available in a subgroup. Immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, electron microscopy, and organotypic cultures were utilized to study complement/microglial activation patterns. FCD Type II samples presenting dendritic spine loss were characterized by an activation of the classical complement pathway and microglial reactivity. In the same samples, a close relationship between microglial cells and dendritic segments/synapses was found. These features were consistently observed in Type IIb FCD and in 1 of 3 Type IIa cases. In other patient groups and in perilesional areas outside the dysplasia, not presenting spine loss, these features were not observed. In vitro treatment with complement proteins of organotypic slices of cortical tissue with no sign of FCD induced a reduction in dendritic spine density. These data suggest that dysregulation of the complement system plays a role in microglia-mediated spine loss. This mechanism, known to be involved in the removal of redundant synapses during development, is likely reactivated in Type II FCD, particularly in Type IIb; local treatment with anticomplement drugs could in principle modify the course of disease in these patients.

An adjuvant strategy enabled by modulation of the physical properties of microbial ligands expands antigen immunogenicity.

Activation of the innate immune system via pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) is key to generate lasting adaptive immunity. PRRs detect unique chemical patterns associated with invading microorganisms, but whether and how the physical properties of PRR ligands influence the development of the immune response remains unknown. Through the study of fungal mannans, we show that the physical form of PRR ligands dictates the immune response. Soluble mannans are immunosilent in the periphery but elicit a potent pro-inflammatory response in the draining lymph node (dLN). By modulating the physical form of mannans, we developed a formulation that targets both the periphery and the dLN. When combined with viral glycoprotein antigens, this mannan formulation broadens epitope recognition, elicits potent antigen-specific neutralizing antibodies, and confers protection against viral infections of the lung. Thus, the physical properties of microbial ligands determine the outcome of the immune response and can be harnessed for vaccine development.

Maturation signatures of conventional dendritic cell subtypes in COVID-19 suggest direct viral sensing.

Growing evidence suggests that conventional dendritic cells (cDCs) undergo aberrant maturation in COVID-19, which negatively affects T-cell activation. The presence of effector T cells in patients with mild disease and dysfunctional T cells in severely ill patients suggests that adequate T-cell responses limit disease severity. Understanding how cDCs cope with SARS-CoV-2 can help elucidate how protective immune responses are generated. Here, we report that cDC2 subtypes exhibit similar infection-induced gene signatures, with the upregulation of IFN-stimulated genes and IL-6 signaling pathways. Furthermore, comparison of cDCs between patients with severe and mild disease showed severely ill patients to exhibit profound downregulation of genes encoding molecules involved in antigen presentation, such as MHCII, TAP, and costimulatory proteins, whereas we observed the opposite for proinflammatory molecules, such as complement and coagulation factors. Thus, as disease severity increases, cDC2s exhibit enhanced inflammatory properties and lose antigen presentation capacity. Moreover, DC3s showed upregulation of anti-apoptotic genes and accumulated during infection. Direct exposure of cDC2s to the virus in vitro recapitulated the activation profile observed in vivo. Our findings suggest that SARS-CoV-2 interacts directly with cDC2s and implements an efficient immune escape mechanism that correlates with disease severity by downregulating crucial molecules required for T-cell activation.

A semi-automatic registration protocol to match ex-vivo high-field 7T MR images and histological slices in surgical samples from patients with drug-resistant epilepsy.

BACKGROUND: MRI is a fundamental tool to detect brain structural anomalies and improvement in this technique has the potential to visualize subtle abnormalities currently undetected. Correlation between pre-operative MRI and histopathology is required to validate the neurobiological basis of MRI abnormalities. However, precise MRI-histology matching is very challenging with the surgical samples. We previously developed a coregistration protocol to match the in-vivo MRI with ex-vivo MRI obtained from surgical specimens. Now, we complete the process to successfully align ex-vivo MRI data with the proper digitalized histological sections in an automatic way. NEW METHOD: The implemented pipeline is composed by the following steps: a) image pre-processing made of MRI and histology volumes conversion and masking; b) gross rigid body alignment between MRI volume and histology virtual slides; c) rigid alignment between each MRI section and histology slice and estimate of the correlation coefficient for each step to select the MRI slice that best matches histology; d) final linear registration of the selected slices. RESULTS: This method is fully automatic, except for the first masking step, fast and reliable in comparison to the manual one, as assessed using a Bland-Altman plot. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS: The visual assessment usually employed for choosing the best fitting ex-vivo MRI slice for each stained section takes hours and requires practice. Goubran et al. (2015) proposed an iterative registration protocol but its aim and methods were different from ours. No others similar methods are reported in the literature. CONCLUSIONS: This protocol completes our previous pipeline. The ultimate goal will be to apply the entire process to finely investigate the relationship between clinical MRI data and histopathological features in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy.

The interferon landscape along the respiratory tract impacts the severity of COVID-19.

Severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is characterized by overproduction of immune mediators, but the role of interferons (IFNs) of the type I (IFN-I) or type III (IFN-III) families remains debated. We scrutinized the production of IFNs along the respiratory tract of COVID-19 patients and found that high levels of IFN-III, and to a lesser extent IFN-I, characterize the upper airways of patients with high viral burden but reduced disease risk or severity. Production of specific IFN-III, but not IFN-I, members denotes patients with a mild pathology and efficiently drives the transcription of genes that protect against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). In contrast, compared to subjects with other infectious or noninfectious lung pathologies, IFNs are overrepresented in the lower airways of patients with severe COVID-19 that exhibit gene pathways associated with increased apoptosis and decreased proliferation. Our data demonstrate a dynamic production of IFNs in SARS-CoV-2-infected patients and show IFNs play opposing roles at distinct anatomical sites.

NF-κB dynamics determine the stimulus specificity of epigenomic reprogramming in macrophages.

The epigenome of macrophages can be reprogrammed by extracellular cues, but the extent to which different stimuli achieve this is unclear. Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) is a transcription factor that is activated by all pathogen-associated stimuli and can reprogram the epigenome by activating latent enhancers. However, we show that NF-κB does so only in response to a subset of stimuli. This stimulus specificity depends on the temporal dynamics of NF-κB activity, in particular whether it is oscillatory or non-oscillatory. Non-oscillatory NF-κB opens chromatin by sustained disruption of nucleosomal histone-DNA interactions, enabling activation of latent enhancers that modulate expression of immune response genes. Thus, temporal dynamics can determine a transcription factor's capacity to reprogram the epigenome in a stimulus-specific manner.

Detection of viral gene expression in risk-stratified biopsies reveals no active HPV in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma.

BACKGROUND: Human papillomavirus (HPV) infection is known to promote the development of mucosal squamous cell carcinoma (mSCC), including pathologically high-grade lesions, but its role in cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cuSCC) remains unclear, particularly in lesions that are considered high risk. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to determine whether enhanced HPV transcriptional activity can be detected in high-risk cuSCC samples compared with low-grade SCC samples or normal skin. METHODS: We performed RNA sequencing of cuSCC across 23 risk-stratified skin lesions. A subset of samples was tested for the presence of HPV DNA. High-quality, non-human reads from each sample group were used for viral analysis using Microbiome Coverage Profiler. RESULTS: None of the samples analysed had detectable expression of HPV RNA, while 64% of samples tested positive for HPV DNA. All samples were found to have expression of human endogenous retrovirus, and multiple samples showed expression of other viruses. CONCLUSIONS: Viral and prophage gene expression can be monitored in cuSCC or normal skin biopsies, yet no sample in our study showed evidence of active HPV gene expression despite evidence of HPV genome presence. This suggests HPV transcription does not play a role in differentiating high-risk cuSCCs from low-risk cuSCCs or normal skin.

Transfer transcriptomic signatures for infectious diseases.

The modulation of the transcriptome is among the earliest responses to infection. However, defining the transcriptomic signatures of disease is challenging because logistic, technical, and cost factors limit the size and representativeness of samples in clinical studies. These limitations lead to a poor performance of signatures when applied to new datasets. Although the study focuses on infection, the central hypothesis of the work is the generalization of sets of signatures across diseases. We use a machine learning approach to identify common elements in datasets and then test empirically whether they are informative about a second dataset from a disease or process distinct from the original dataset. We identify sets of genes, which we name transfer signatures, that are predictive across diverse datasets and/or species (e.g., rhesus to humans). We demonstrate the usefulness of transfer signatures in two use cases: the progression of latent to active tuberculosis and the severity of COVID-19 and influenza A H1N1 infection. This indicates that transfer signatures can be deployed in settings that lack disease-specific biomarkers. The broad significance of our work lies in the concept that a small set of archetypal human immunophenotypes, captured by transfer signatures, can explain a larger set of responses to diverse diseases.

Circulating SARS-CoV-2 spike N439K variants maintain fitness while evading antibody-mediated immunity.

SARS-CoV-2 can mutate and evade immunity, with consequences for efficacy of emerging vaccines and antibody therapeutics. Here, we demonstrate that the immunodominant SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) receptor binding motif (RBM) is a highly variable region of S and provide epidemiological, clinical, and molecular characterization of a prevalent, sentinel RBM mutation, N439K. We demonstrate N439K S protein has enhanced binding affinity to the hACE2 receptor, and N439K viruses have similar in vitro replication fitness and cause infections with similar clinical outcomes as compared to wild type. We show the N439K mutation confers resistance against several neutralizing monoclonal antibodies, including one authorized for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and reduces the activity of some polyclonal sera from persons recovered from infection. Immune evasion mutations that maintain virulence and fitness such as N439K can emerge within SARS-CoV-2 S, highlighting the need for ongoing molecular surveillance to guide development and usage of vaccines and therapeutics.

Dendritic pathology, spine loss and synaptic reorganization in human cortex from epilepsy patients.

Neuronal dendritic arborizations and dendritic spines are crucial for a normal synaptic transmission and may be critically involved in the pathophysiology of epilepsy. Alterations in dendritic morphology and spine loss mainly in hippocampal neurons have been reported both in epilepsy animal models and in human brain tissues from patients with epilepsy. However, it is still unclear whether these dendritic abnormalities relate to the cause of epilepsy or are generated by seizure recurrence. We investigated fine neuronal structures at the level of dendritic and spine organization using Golgi impregnation, and analysed synaptic networks with immunohistochemical markers of glutamatergic (vGLUT1) and GABAergic (vGAT) axon terminals in human cerebral cortices derived from epilepsy surgery. Specimens were obtained from 28 patients with different neuropathologically defined aetiologies: type Ia and type II focal cortical dysplasia, cryptogenic (no lesion) and temporal lobe epilepsy with hippocampal sclerosis. Autoptic tissues were used for comparison. Three-dimensional reconstructions of Golgi-impregnated neurons revealed severe dendritic reshaping and spine alteration in the core of the type II focal cortical dysplasia. Dysmorphic neurons showed increased dendritic complexity, reduction of dendritic spines and occasional filopodia-like protrusions emerging from the soma. Surprisingly, the intermingled normal-looking pyramidal neurons also showed severe spine loss and simplified dendritic arborization. No changes were observed outside the dysplasia (perilesional tissue) or in neocortical postsurgical tissue obtained in the other patient groups. Immunoreactivities of vGLUT1 and vGAT showed synaptic reorganization in the core of type II dysplasia characterized by the presence of abnormal perisomatic baskets around dysmorphic neurons, in particular those with filopodia-like protrusions, and changes in vGLUT1/vGAT expression. Ultrastructural data in type II dysplasia highlighted the presence of altered neuropil engulfed by glial processes. Our data indicate that the fine morphological aspect of neurons and dendritic spines are normal in epileptogenic neocortex, with the exception of type II dysplastic lesions. The findings suggest that the mechanisms leading to this severe form of cortical malformation interfere with the normal dendritic arborization and synaptic network organization. The data argue against the concept that long-lasting epilepsy and seizure recurrence per se unavoidably produce a dendritic pathology.

Ultrapotent human antibodies protect against SARS-CoV-2 challenge via multiple mechanisms.

Efficient therapeutic options are needed to control the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that has caused more than 922,000 fatalities as of 13 September 2020. We report the isolation and characterization of two ultrapotent SARS-CoV-2 human neutralizing antibodies (S2E12 and S2M11) that protect hamsters against SARS-CoV-2 challenge. Cryo-electron microscopy structures show that S2E12 and S2M11 competitively block angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) attachment and that S2M11 also locks the spike in a closed conformation by recognition of a quaternary epitope spanning two adjacent receptor-binding domains. Antibody cocktails that include S2M11, S2E12, or the previously identified S309 antibody broadly neutralize a panel of circulating SARS-CoV-2 isolates and activate effector functions. Our results pave the way to implement antibody cocktails for prophylaxis or therapy, circumventing or limiting the emergence of viral escape mutants.

Author Correction: Profiling immunoglobulin repertoires across multiple human tissues using RNA sequencing.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Advances in Genomics for Drug Development.

Drug development (target identification, advancing drug leads to candidates for preclinical and clinical studies) can be facilitated by genetic and genomic knowledge. Here, we review the contribution of population genomics to target identification, the value of bulk and single cell gene expression analysis for understanding the biological relevance of a drug target, and genome-wide CRISPR editing for the prioritization of drug targets. In genomics, we discuss the different scope of genome-wide association studies using genotyping arrays, versus exome and whole genome sequencing. In transcriptomics, we discuss the information from drug perturbation and the selection of biomarkers. For CRISPR screens, we discuss target discovery, mechanism of action and the concept of gene to drug mapping. Harnessing genetic support increases the probability of drug developability and approval.