Flowers Klausen (witchbadger81)
Vaccines are one of the greatest medical innovations of all time, but there has been skepticism about them throughout history. Although initial concerns about scarcity increased public demand for COVID-19 vaccines, as supply meets demand, vaccine hesitancy may become a defining theme of the next stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. RNA vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have demonstrated ∼95% efficacy in phase III clinical trials. Although complete vaccination consisted of 2 doses, the onset of protection for both licensed RNA vaccines was observed as early as 12days after a single dose. The adaptive immune response that coincides with this onset of protection could represent the necessary elements of immunity against COVID-19. Serological and Tcell analysis was performed in a cohort of 20 healthcare workers after receiving the first dose of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 vaccine. The primary endpoint was the adaptive immune responses detectable at days 7 and 10 after dosing. Spike-specific Tcells and binding antibodies were detectable 10days after the first dose of the vaccine, in contrast to receptor-blocking and severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) neutralizing antibodies, which were mostly undetectable at this early time point. Our findings suggest that early Tcell and binding antibody responses, rather than either receptor-blocking or virus neutralizing activity, induced early protection against COVID-19. The study was funded by a generous donation from The Hour Glass to support COVID-19 research. The study was funded by a generous donation from The Hour Glass to support COVID-19 research.Regulating gene expression through retroviral infection has been widely used in mouse bone marrow transplantation (BMT) to test the capacity of self-renewal, as well as multi-lineage differentiation of hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs). However, it remains challenging to achieve high transduction efficiency in bone marrow cells as transduction of these cells subsequently leads to transplantation failure. Here, we present a modified protocol to overcome this issue, enabling reproducible and high-efficient retroviral transduction of HSPCs for BMT. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Yang et al. (2019).Current knowledge on brain oligodendrogenesis, composed of three sequential waves from different regions, is mainly obtained from rodent studies. Oligodendroglial development and myelination in the rodent brain may not fully mirror those processes in the human brain. Here, we provide a step-by-step protocol for generating fused forebrain organoids derived from human pluripotent stem cells. These fused organoids recapitulate human oligodendroglial developments, offering innovative insights into human myelination research in vitro. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Cameron-Curry and Le Douarin (1995), Kessaris et al. (2006), and Kim et al. (2019).Ultra-high field (UHF) neuroimaging affords the sub-millimeter resolution that allows researchers to interrogate brain computations at a finer scale than that afforded by standard fMRI techniques. Here, we present a step-by-step protocol for using UHF imaging (Siemens Terra 7T scanner) to measure activity in the human brain. We outline how to preprocess the data using a pipeline that combines tools from SPM, FreeSurfer, ITK-SNAP, and BrainVoyager and correct for vasculature-related confounders to improve the spatial accuracy of the fMRI signal. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Jia et al. (2020) and Zamboni et al. (2020).Here, we describe a protocol for comprehensive quantification of autophagosome recruitment to mitochondria as an early step in mitophagy. Data collected using this protocol can be useful in the study of neurodegenerative disease, cancer, and me