Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 5290002, Israel.
Virology. 2013 Sep 1;443(2):285-93. doi: 10.1016/j.virol.2013.05.021. Epub 2013 Jun 12.
Varicella Zoster virus (VZV) productively infects humans causing varicella upon primary infection and herpes zoster upon reactivation from latency in neurons. In vitro studies using cell-associated VZV infection have demonstrated productive VZV-infection, while a few recent studies of human neurons derived from stem cells incubated with cell-free, vaccine-derived VZV did not result in generation of infectious virus. In the present study, 90%-pure human embryonic stem cell-derived neurons were incubated with recombinant cell-free pOka-derived virus made with an improved method or VZV vaccine. We found that cell-free pOka and vOka at higher multiplicities of infection elicited productive infection in neurons followed by spread of infection, cytopathic effect and release of infectious virus into the medium. These results further validate the use of this unlimited source of human neurons for studying unexplored aspects of VZV interaction with neurons such as entry, latency and reactivation.
水痘带状疱疹病毒（VZV）可在人体中进行有效感染，初次感染会引起水痘，潜伏在神经元中的再激活会引起带状疱疹。使用细胞相关 VZV 感染的体外研究证明了 VZV 的有效感染，而最近的几项关于用无细胞、疫苗衍生的 VZV 孵育的源自干细胞的人类神经元的研究并未导致产生感染性病毒。在本研究中，用改良方法制备的重组无细胞 pOka 衍生病毒或 VZV 疫苗孵育 90%-纯人胚胎干细胞衍生神经元。我们发现，用更高的感染复数的无细胞 pOka 和 vOka 可在神经元中引发有效的感染，随后感染扩散，出现细胞病变效应，并将感染性病毒释放到培养基中。这些结果进一步验证了使用这种无限来源的人类神经元来研究 VZV 与神经元相互作用的未探索方面的有效性，如进入、潜伏和再激活。
