Tackling COVID Complexity

One of the mysteries surrounding SARS-CoV-2 infections is the wide variety of symptoms and outcomes – from having no signs of disease at all right through to death. Furthermore, while some patients have a short-lived cough and fever, others may have a series of strange symptoms lasting months. To understand more about the varied effects of the virus, scientists have engineered mice to carry the human ACE2 receptor (the virus’s entry point) throughout the cells of their bodies. Sure enough, when infected with SARS-CoV-2, such animals exhibited pathologies in multiple organs, not just the lungs. The damaged and disorganised cells of an infected animal’s heart are shown on the right, for example, with a healthy heart of an uninfected animal shown left. The researchers also found evidence that some virus-induced changes might be long lasting, suggesting the animals could be valuable for understanding and developing ways to treat long-haul COVID.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Shen Li and colleagues
• Division of Cardiology, Department of Medicine, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in JCI Insight, December 2020