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

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.