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Dryad

Data from: Live imaging of SARS-CoV-2 infected airway epithelium cultures

Data files

Oct 07, 2024 version files 257.75 GB

Abstract

SARS-CoV-2 infects the conducting airways, where mucociliary clearance inhibits pathogen penetrance. Mucociliary clearance is a dynamic system, and both the host and the pathogen can influence it. To better understand how SARS-CoV-2 changes MCC, we performed live imaging of infected differentiated primary human bronchial epithelium cultures over multiple days. We used a fluorescent reporter virus and fluorescent markers for tubulin and apoptotic cells to understand changes in the culture in both infected and bystander cells. In whole culture movies, we saw that SARS-CoV-2 infection foci traced the motion of mucus, suggesting that mucociliary clearance shapes the spread of the virus. We then monitored how mucociliary clearance changed during infection. We found that SARS-CoV-2 infection induced defects in ciliary motion in both infected and bystander cells, taking ~4 days for the infected cells to become numerous and old enough to impact culture-wide ciliary motion.