Monkeypox virus infection of human astrocytes causes gasdermin B cleavage and pyroptosis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Monkeypox virus (MPXV) infections in humans cause neurological disorders while studies of MPXV-infected animals indicate that the virus penetrates the brain. Pyroptosis is an inflammatory type of regulated cell death, resulting from plasma membrane rupture (PMR) due to oligomerization of cleaved gasdermins to cause membrane pore formation. Herein, we investigated the human neural cell tropism of MPXV compared to another orthopoxvirus, vaccinia virus (VACV), as well as its effects on immune responses and cell death. Astrocytes were most permissive to MPXV (and VACV) infections, followed by microglia and oligodendrocytes, with minimal infection of neurons based on plaque assays. Aberrant morphological changes were evident in MPXV-infected astrocytes that were accompanied with viral protein (I3) immunolabelling and detection of over 125 MPXV-encoded proteins in cell lysates by mass spectrometry. MPXV- and VACV-infected astrocytes showed increased expression of immune gene transcripts ( IL12, IRF3, IL1B, TNFA, CASP1 , and GSDMB ). However, MPXV infection of astrocytes specifically induced proteolytic cleavage of gasdermin B (GSDMB) (50 kDa), evident by the appearance of cleaved N-terminal-GSDMB (30 kDa) and C-terminal- GSDMB (18 kDa) fragments. GSDMB cleavage was associated with release of lactate dehydrogenase and increased cellular nucleic acid staining, indicative of PMR. Pre-treatment with dimethyl fumarate reduced cleavage of GSDMB and associated PMR in MPXV-infected astrocytes. Human astrocytes support productive MPXV infection, resulting in inflammatory gene induction with accompanying GSDMB-mediated pyroptosis. These findings clarify the recently recognized neuropathogenic effects of MPXV in humans while also offering potential therapeutic options.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".