On the experimental generation of endogenous (non-retroviral) RNA viruses

A retrovirus. http://www.itqb.unl.pt/

The sheer amount of genomic data now available from a wide range of species has allowed the increased scrutiny over what genes and DNA sequences are present in their chromosomes. What we have begun to notice is that many of these sequences have a viral origin. 

And, in the recent half-decade, the numbers of these endogenous viruses discovered have rapidly increased, but how did they get there? What are they doing? And, are they bad for us? Only a true experimental model system can answer these question but this is something which is lacking.

Lets talk about ERVs

Now, viruses have left their mark on our genomes in more ways than one; infection and associated disease/mortality has heavily influenced the genetic structure of populations via natural selection and genetic drift for millions of years. Yet, another important mechanism is that employed by the endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) that have inserted a DNA copy of themselves into our chromosomes - the norm for retroviruses - and have forever become part of us.

Over the course of evolution, these once infectious viruses have become redundant, building up a collection of genetic mutations resulting in loss of replicative ability. Although many still play a role in the cellular biology of the host and have been a great source of genetic novelty over the billions of years of evolution.


For some excellent info on these viruses, see ERVs archive of ERV-related material.


What about non-ERVs?

However, what we have noticed is that viruses other than retroviral species have inserted themselves into genomes of humans, other animals and even plants and fungi. Many of these viruses have a DNA phase in their replication cycle, which is put into the genome of their host to aid their survival and so it may not be all that surprising that they have stayed with us through evolution (these viruses include many single-stranded DNA viruses and again).

One intriguing observation is that many of these non-retroviral endogenous viruses are in fact - or were - RNA viruses with no known DNA phase during replication. They are therefore called Non-retroviral RNA virus sequences (NRVSs). See plant NRVSs and mammalian NRVS (ebola virus-like , borna virus-like  and many more - (lots, they're everywhere). There is strong evidence that these integrations occurred thousands, if not millions of years ago and could have played a role in the evolution of many species.


How can we study these viruses?

But just exactly how do these viruses do it? After-all, they are RNA viruses without a reverse-transcriptase enzyme and hence no natural ability to produce a DNA genome that can be inserted into our chromosomes. And, can we follow this endogenisation experimentally? One mechanism is thought to occur when an endogenous retrovirus-like element joins itself to a non-endogenous RNA virus and then this chimera is put into our genome. But this is really only half the story - can we ever study the entire process, from initial infection to endogenisation?

 For an RNA virus to become fully integrated into our germline it has to first infect our germ-line cells (sperm/oocytes); its RNA genome must be copied into DNA and this DNA molecule must be inserted into the chromosome. It also must allow for the development of healthy and reproductively active offspring and can then let evolution take its course. An experimental model system of this process would allow for a better understanding of this process in molecular detail and how this relates to the evolutionary process as a whole.

Here's how you would do it:

The animal model

Bank vole - a good model for endogenous viruses?

A small-animal model that could be infected by a  type of virus that had been shown to integrate into the genome (borna disease virus, for example) would make this easier to study. Plus, many rodents have been shown to harbour many NRVSs already.

The virus infection

You would infect the animals with the virus in as natural conditions as possible and look to see whether the virus entered and replicated in the cells of the germ-line.A GFP-expressing virus would work best for this.

Detection of RNA - DNA

What you would have to do is be able to track the process of turning the RNA genome into DNA. A PCR-based screening would work well for this and could be applied to a range of tissues in the host, including occytes/spermatozoa.

Integration

To prove that the DNA copy was inserted into the host chromosome you would need to sequence the sites where the DNA had integrated in and determine where in the genome it lay.

Stability

This experimentally infected rodents could be bred continously and the presence of endogenised virus looked for in their offspring. The expression of said virus genes (if there is any) could be followed in rodent tissues.

Borna disease PCR without reverse-transcriptase. A) no nuclease treated, B) RNA nuclease treated, C) DNA nuclease treated and D) PCR with reverse transcriptase step

Well one paper has maybe taken the first step in the development of such a model system (although they may not know it). It has shown evidence that if you infect baby bank voles with borna virus, directly into their brain you can detect borna virus-specific DNA sequences using PCR following DNA extraction (see above PCR gel for results).  And, these sequences resulted from the virus, not some already-endogenised borna virus sequence. Although they did not check for germ-line infection or integration, this is the first step. The applicability of Borna virus reverse genetics and these animal models could make this kind of study feasible but certainly not easy. We may in future catch a glimpse of this process in real-time.

Kinnunen, P., Inkeroinen, H., Ilander, M., Kallio, E., Heikkilä, H., Koskela, E., Mappes, T., Palva, A., Vaheri, A., Kipar, A., & Vapalahti, O. (2011). Intracerebral Borna Disease Virus Infection of Bank Voles Leading to Peripheral Spread and Reverse Transcription of Viral RNA PLoS ONE, 6 (8) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023622

Should vaccinology embrace systems biology?

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction.

E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977) British Economist

Vaccines represent one of the most cost effective methods around to prevent loss of life and disease in a whole range of animals, including the human population. Over the last 200 years or so, we've become pretty adept at producing them and so the science of vaccinology - or how to generate these complex pharmaceuticals  - has led to the eradication (and near eradication) of many viral pathogens.

This is one network in your immune response following influenza vaccination (Kokke et al 2011) as id'd through systems biology approaches. Knowledge of key mediators in these pathways may allow for the rational design of new vaccines - but is it worth it?

But, it hasn't succeeded for a number of currently killer viruses (respiratory synycitial virus and HIV to name but two) and we have begun to think that maybe the method of 'isolate, attenuate, vaccinate' or the synthesis of single virus antigen molecules isn't gonna cut it anymore. So what are we going to do?

We are wanting to rationally generate vaccines - taking a wild-type, disease-causing isolate and through some genetic engineering, make it sufficiently weak so as to generate an effective immune response in patients while not causing disease. Yet, this is harder than it looks and so some researchers are now turning to systems biology to offer a glimpse into how some of our most successful vaccines function so as we can reconstruct these processes for the numbers of viral pathogens we are yet to protect against.

*I have explored how we may attempt to do this from the viruses perspective (mumps virus versus vaccine, here), more precisely: how come the vaccine strain is less deadly than the 'wild' strains. Both are valid approaches and probably just as difficult to carry out as each other.*

Systems biology affords us a chance to more fully understand the complexity of living systems. Through the collection of reams of data (DNA sequences, gene expression changes, protein levels - and other 'omics' technologies) we are now able to adequately model what is going on in the organism/cell through now more common bioinformatic and statistical analyses. As in the quote I used above, it is not about making the study of life more complex, it is really about realizing this fact and doing something to understand it better under a broader way of thinking. This allows us to 'see' changes and functional differences that we would never have observed had we gone about such an experiment using our a priori knowledge and this global, holistic view may just be the savior that vaccinology needs now.

Example of the complex data collected during a typical 'systems' experiment - what does it all mean, and how can we find something important and worthwhile to study?

I am aware of a number of papers that are currently using this process as a primer to develop improved vaccine products (see here, here and review here of virus vaccine examples). These guys - for example: Bali Pulandran of the Emory Vaccine Centre in Atlanta, USA - are interested in comparing the immune response (humoral response, innate immunity and gene expression changes) of human subjects administered with vaccines. The response to the yellow fever virus vaccine as well as two types of influenza vaccines have been approached and through complex bioinformatic modelling they were able to pull out some significant correlates of immune response - this they hope will aid in the future testing of novel vaccines and facilitate a rational take on vaccine generation by identifying a gene(s)/protein with a functional role in the immune response. This they have begun to do in some of ther papers above - it is nice to see this kind of work being used as a basis for experimental biology.

These types of studies hail a new way of thinking about viruses, vaccines and the immune response to them; if only we can realize the power in taking a step back and looking at the diversity in each. And this type of work could be applied to any number of mechanisms such as vaccine safety or applying it to different tissues during an infection.

Saying that - this stuff isn't particularly easy, cheap or quick as you might think. But as each study generates so much data, might it not take but a few such investigations to lead us on the way of rationally attenuated and protective vaccines? So, should vaccinology embrace systems biology? I think if you have the abilities to do such a study - which from a pharma perspective definitely yes, do it as the more information we have at our disposal the better position we are in. We await further results from these groups to compare how well systems thinking goes up against human ingenuity, that has worked well in the past.

Nakaya HI, Wrammert J, Lee EK, Racioppi L, Marie-Kunze S, Haining WN, Means AR, Kasturi SP, Khan N, Li GM, McCausland M, Kanchan V, Kokko KE, Li S, Elbein R, Mehta AK, Aderem A, Subbarao K, Ahmed R, & Pulendran B (2011). Systems biology of vaccination for seasonal influenza in humans. Nature immunology, 12 (8), 786-95 PMID: 21743478

“The virus is ‘dead’. Long ‘live’ the virus.” – what does history say about how virology should develop in the future?

In the modern world, we are continuously challenged by viral disease; well established pathogens such as the measles and mumps viruses alongside recently (re)-emerging viruses such as ebola-virus and even those viruses which we currently know little about (XMRV?) all represent a continuous threat to human health and well-being. Yet how can this be true when we have been developing anti-viral vaccines for half a decade – surely we should be good at it by now? And, is this idea that we can easily eradicate viruses hollow, considering how relatively easy it may be to recreate long extinct pathogens from their nucleic acid sequence alone? These investigations will require years of research and billions of dollars in funding but how should it achieved?

NEIDL building in Boston

In a recent article (UK Society for General Microbiology publication 'Microbiology Today', can be found here), Paul Duprex and  Elke Mühlberger, both virologists from the Boston UniversitySchool of Medicine and associated National Emerging Infectious Disease Laboratories (NEIDL) put forward their view on how best virology may be able to face up to this global challenge and outline how it may be achieved. Through a firm grasp of its historical context, combined with recent developments in molecular biology, future scientists will better be able to understand the intertwined relationship between viral pathogenesis and its rational attenuation. If we understand how viruses cause disease at the molecular level, altering this through well-established DNA technologies we may be able to mitigate pathogenesis and develop improved or novel vaccines – and antivirals - on a rational level.

In the early days of virology (see site on the history of vaccines), bent on developing vaccines under the paradigm of “isolate, attenuate and vaccinate”, scientists barely understood the mechanisms behind the production of live-attenuated vaccines, such as those for measles and smallpox. They didn’t need to; they worked superbly and were of course highly effective allowing for the eradication of one of the worst diseases of mankind. But this golden age didn’t last long, with countless viruses proving somewhat more resistant to this ‘black box’ method of vaccinology; HIV-1, SARS and Ebola had not yet been observed by scientists and nothing was known about them. This was an age concentrated on investigating viral pathogenesis and how best to change it but with the developments of recombinant DNA methodology (two important papers concerning virus cloning and synthetic virology: 1 and 2) this agenda shifted in favour of the virus genome and it is hard to even outline the tremendous impact this molecular understanding of viruses has had on both basic and applied virology. Yet bear in mind that it is this same technology that could facilitate the resurrection and recreation of ‘eradicated’ virues.

Knowledge of the molecular biology of viruses (in this case measles virus) will go a long way in developing much needed novel, rational vaccines

Despite this word of caution, Duprex and Mühlberger argue that virology has – or at least should – come back full circle, back to understanding basic pathogenesis with the aim in mind of developing more effective therapies and vaccines; this, they say, is needed now more so than ever. This generation, and the next, of molecular virologists should take heed of the long historical roots their discipline has and highlight the importance of understanding disease and attenuation as two sides of the same coin. This of course, would allow for a better grasp of the basic biology of these long established pathogens; those viruses which are now extinct but which may resurface, or even those viruses which are constantly in our minds as agents of natures bioterrorism.  They conclude that “a long overdue renaissance in vaccinology has commenced and it is with anticipation and excitement that we wait to see progress in the next decade”.

Mahalingam S, Damon IK, & Lidbury BA (2004). 25 years since the eradication of smallpox: why poxvirus research is still relevant. Trends in immunology, 25 (12), 636-9 PMID: 15530831

Mueller S, Coleman JR, Papamichail D, Ward CB, Nimnual A, Futcher B, Skiena S, & Wimmer E (2010). Live attenuated influenza virus vaccines by computer-aided rational design. Nature biotechnology, 28 (7), 723-6 PMID: 20543832

Racaniello VR, & Baltimore D (1981). Molecular cloning of poliovirus cDNA and determination of the complete nucleotide sequence of the viral genome. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 78 (8), 4887-91 PMID: 6272282

Wimmer E, Mueller S, Tumpey TM, & Taubenberger JK (2009). Synthetic viruses: a new opportunity to understand and prevent viral disease. Nature biotechnology, 27 (12), 1163-72 PMID: 20010599

Uncovering the biomedical and evolutionary importance of primate innate immunity

Primates such as chimpanzees differ in the diseases that affect them - especially when we compare them to those that affect us. Progression to AIDs, cancer incidence, Alzheimers disease and malaria either do not affect or cause less severe diseases in non-human primates than they do in humans. So why are our primate cousins so differently affected by these particular diseases than we are? What causes these differences? Are they environmentally mediated? Behavioural? Molecular?

What does the innate immune system have to say about it?

The pathogenesis of disease is an important area of research when trying to understand the origins and progression of diseases. It depends on many variables - host specific, environmental or pathogen specific. A recent publication has sought to understand these differences from the point of view of host factors mainly the innate immune system. By comparing genome-wide gene expression patterns in primary immune cells (monocytes) cultured in vitro from groups of humans, chimpanzees and rhesus macaques and applying bioinformatic analysis to the results, the investigators were able to detect those genes whose expression is altered upon stimulation with lipopolysacharide (LPS), an important activator of the innate immune system. From this data set they could ask, functionally, what makes the human immune system different?



3,170 genes were seen to be differentially expressed with 793 changing in all three species indicating a conserved function. Other genes showed species-specific changes allowing researchers to ask what makes each species unique? More importantly what makes non-human primates different when it comes to diseases? There were 335 genes in the human monocytes that were expressed differently and these were divided between particular pathways.

What does this data have to say about specific diseases?

Those genes listed as being involved in viral infection were those most likely to be species-specific indicating the rapid adaptation of host immunity to fast-evolving viral pathogens. The data sheds light on the possible lo incidence of cancer in non-human primates by detecting the difference in apoptosis/cancer related genes - although the signifigance of monocyte gene expression when considering the whole-organism in diseases such as cancer is difficult to say. Most interestingly seen are those genes involved in HIV infection and AIDs  whose expression may explain why chimpanzees do not progress to AIDs or do so slowly.

Despite the problems in culturing non-human primate immune cells in vitro and the difficulties in controlling for environmental effects (different diets of primates), this study goes some way to understanding at a functional level what makes humans human from an immunological point of view. Although focussing on a single cell type, the monocyte, other cells may prove useful in investigating innate differences - as other cells also function in innate immunity - mucosal epithelium for one. This work paves the way for more detailed molecular analysis but also of more genome-wide work looking at other cells, other activators and pathogens (not LPS but HIV?). Understanding what makes humans different in a pathogenic light should focus not just on immunology at the gene expression level but also differences in epigenomics, behaviour, anatomy and cell biology.

 

 

Varki, Aijit. 2000. A Chimpanzee Genome Project is a Biomedical Imperitive. Genome Res. 2000. 10: 1065-1070. doi: 10.1101/gr.10.8.1065

Barreiro, Luis B., John C. Marioni, Ran Blekhman, Matthew Stephens, and Yoav Gilad. 2010. Functional Comparison of Innate Immune Signaling Pathways in Primates. Ed. Greg Gibson PLoS Genetics 6, no. 12 (December): e1001249. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1001249. http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1001249.

Massively parallel sequencing meets the vaccine industry

Live attenuated vaccines (LAVS), such as those produced for measles, mumps and influenza viruses, must have both high safety and immunogenicity if we are ever going to prevent human infection. Those vaccines, which are deemed unsafe, will be withdrawn resulting in low uptake and increased pathogen transmission and those vaccines which are poorly immunogenic, will not be  protective and result in pathogen transmission and significant disease

The key to easily predicting how safe a vaccine is – and also how immunogenic -, may lie in our ability to infer the phenotype (safety in humans) from the genotype (nucleic acid sequence). One problem with this is the inherent genetic instability of  RNA viruses; viruses such as polio, measles and mumps which are responsible for considerable disease in humans and which we vaccinate millions of people worldwide each year. This genetic instability results in what is generally considered as a viral ‘qausipecies’; a cloud-like structure in viral genome sequence space that can have multiple phenotypic properties: one being the safety, or lack of in humans. One example is that of oral polio vaccine strains which during production in tissue culture can accumulate genomic changes resulting in neurovirulence in humans.

In order to assess the safety we must therefore assay the genetic consistency or the types and frequency of particular changes in our vaccines prior to human administration to avoid vaccine induced disease. As I mentioned previously, our ability to assess the safety relies on our means of predicting phenotype from genotype, something that for most viruses is particularly difficult and time consuming. We are therefore  in a position in which we do not know the genetic determinants of safety and so cannot predict it based on nucleic acid sequence.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="257" caption="MPS analysis of two batches of type 3 OPV performed by pyrosequencing. (A) The number of times each nucleotide was read in forward (green) and reverse (red) orientations. (B and C) Mutational profiles for vaccine batches that failed and passed the MNVT, respectively. Here and in all other figures the contents of mutants is shown by colored bars: mutations to A shown in orange, mutations to C in red, mutations to G in blue, and mutations to U in green. Neverov & Chumakov.(2010)"][/caption]

Neverov and Chumakov, from the American Food and Drug association (FDA) recently published a method in which massively parallel sequencing (MPS) is used to accurately and rapidly quantify nucleotide changes across entire poliovirus vaccine genomes.  This method proved to be very sensitive at detecting low frequency changes, changes that may have led to disease in humans. The group put forward the view that we do not truly have to know the direct relationship between genome sequence and safety but what we can do is compare the genotype and frequency of each change with previous ‘safe’ vaccine sequences. Vaccines will be allowed for human use if they have similar viral populations as a previously used strain. They offer this method as a replacement to the slower and less accurate mutant analysis by PCR and restriction enzyme cleavage (MAPREC) method.

The authors admit that the wide-scale implementation of MPS will be inhibited by the high running cost of the equipment.; a cost that they say is much less than the previously used primate neuroviruelance assay. Investment in this technology is expected to lead to a rapid decrease in price and hence will result in increased uptake of this in LAV production worldwide. Neverov and Chumakov have applied this novel sequencing technology to an important area of the vaccine industry. This application will find use in not only polio vaccines but in other LAV production and may also be implemented in the discovery of new genetic determinants of viral safety and immunogenicity.

Neverov, Alexander, and Konstantin Chumakov. 2010. Massively parallel sequencing for monitoring genetic consistency and quality control of live viral vaccines. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 107, no. 46 (November). doi:10.1073