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Lipid and Nucleocapsid N-Protein Accumulation in COVID-19 Patient Lung and Infected Cells

2022; American Society for Microbiology; Volume: 10; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1128/spectrum.01271-21

2165-0497

Anita E. Grootemaat, Sanne van der Niet, Edwin R. Scholl, Eva Roos, Bernadette Schurink, Marianna Bugiani, Sara Miller, Per Larsen, Jeannette Pankras, Eric A. Reits, Nicole N. van der Wel,

Thermal Regulation in Medicine

The pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has caused a global outbreak and prompted an enormous research effort. Still, the subcellular localization of the coronavirus in lungs of COVID-19 patients is not well understood. Here, the localization of the SARS-CoV-2 proteins is studied in postmortem lung material of COVID-19 patients and in SARS-CoV-2-infected Vero cells, processed identically. Correlative light and electron microscopy on semithick cryo-sections demonstrated induction of electron-lucent, lipid-filled compartments after SARS-CoV-2 infection in both lung and cell cultures. In lung tissue, the nonstructural protein 4 and the stable nucleocapsid N-protein were detected on these novel lipid-filled compartments. The induction of such lipid-filled compartments and the localization of the viral proteins in lung of patients with fatal COVID-19 may explain the extensive inflammatory response and provide a new hallmark for SARS-CoV-2 infection at the final, fatal stage of infection.