In a small lab on the third floor of the LSU School of Veterinary Medicine, a professor and her grad students are using mice, mosquitos and monkey cells to study the latest outbreak of the Zika virus.
Pathobiological sciences assistant professor Rebecca Christofferson is researching the virus to see how it presents itself in different forms.
On Feb. 1, the World Health Organization named the Zika virus a global health emergency, highlighting the importance of this study.
Christofferson’s research began in June 2015, just before the virus began spreading in South and Central America at rapid rates.
Christofferson said the timing of the research was “fortuitous” because she started before the outbreak, when many other researchers began.
She said the virus has infected so many because there is no natural immunity and no vaccine.
“It’s just taken off like wildfire,”Christofferson said.
Christofferson is working with veterinary science doctoral students Ania Kawiecki and Handly Mayton.
Kawiecki injects mice and mosquitoes with the virus to measure the level of immunity, while Mayton works with monkey cells.
“The fact that now [the virus] is becoming relevant just makes it cooler,” Kawiecki said.
The lab infects the cells with the virus to investigate what factors alter or encourage its transmission.
They are analyzing how long the infection period is in mice and the probability of transmitting it to a mosquito with varying amounts of virus in the blood.
“We look at how well it performs in this mosquito versus this mosquito, and how does it interact with the new virus in human cells.” Christofferson said. “We’re looking at the potential for immune pressures from people, but obviously in the Americas there’s not going to be much.”
The research also works to examine how Zika interacts with similar mosquito-transmitted viruses, like Dengue and Chikungunya.
“We want to know if there’s some sort of cross-talk between Dengue, a related virus to Zika, and what does that do to your susceptibility to Zika,” Christofferson said.
She said the team’s goal is to improve the ability to diagnose the virus.
It causes flu-like symptoms and a rash, but the virus is evolving and is not always caught before it causes worse effects.
Many people link Zika with Microcephaly, a birth defect that alters the brain’s formation. Christofferson says there is no confirmed relation between the two yet, but the scientific community is pushing to prove the connection.
“We want to help the public health community be able to say, ‘you have Dengue, you have Zika, or you’ve had both.’ We are looking at ways to improve the diagnostic capabilities,” she said.