Almost a year ago our lab published a paper in mBio about the newly discovered coronavirus MERS-CoV (although it was called HCoV-EMC back then). In short, our conclusions were that the MERS coronavirus grows very well in human airway epithelial cells cultured at Air-Liquid Interface (ALI) and as other human coronaviruses it evades host innate immune recognition. Additionally, we showed that treatment with recombinant human interferon can reduce the replication of MERS-CoV in our culture system.
We also submitted a suggestion for a cover image once the paper was accepted for publishing. We wanted to have a little fun with it and make it a bit psychedelic and interesting. The image is made from a confocal Z-stack of human airway epithelial cell culture infected with human coronavirus 229E, a common cold virus. The stack was reconstructed in 3D using Imaris software. The same software was used to change the colors but the image itself was assembled in CorelDraw.
Upper left corner: Nuclei (blue), Cilia (red), viral RNA (green).
The paper also has some psychedelic images of ALI cultures infected with SARS and MERS CoVs. Those who are interested can find the paper here.
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