Post-acute immunological and behavioral sequelae in mice after Omicron infection

Progress in understanding long COVID ­­­and developing effective therapeutics is hampered in part by the lack of suitable animal models. Here we used ACE2-transgenic mice recovered from Omicron (BA.1) infection to test for pulmonary and behavioral post-acute sequelae. Through in-depth phenotyping by CyTOF, we demonstrate that naïve mice experiencing a first Omicron infection exhibit profound immune perturbations in the lung after resolving acute infection. This is not observed if mice were first vaccinated with spike-encoding mRNA. The protective effects of vaccination against post-acute sequelae were associated with a highly polyfunctional SARS-CoV-2-specific T cell response that was recalled upon BA.1 breakthrough infection but not seen with BA.1 infection alone. Without vaccination, the chemokine receptor CXCR4 was uniquely upregulated on multiple pulmonary immune subsets in the BA.1 convalescent mice, a process previously connected to severe COVID-19. Taking advantage of recent deve..., , , **READ ME FILE**

General Information

Title: Vaccination protects against persistence of pulmonary immunological perturbations in mouse model of long COVID

Contact:

Nadia Roan, PhD

Gladstone Institutes

University of California, San Francisco

Dates of collection:

4/1/2022 6/27/2022

Information about geographic location of data collection:

San Francisco Bay Area

Key Words:

COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, Mouse Model, Long Covid, Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), T cells, CyTOF, CXCR4

Data and File Overview

Included are total 40 FCS files corresponding to CyTOF data generated from the murine lung. Data were generated from the following five groups of mice:

1. Mock-treated (Mock)
2. Vaccinated (Vac)
3. BA.1 convalescent (BA1)
4. Vaccinated, BA.1 convalescent (Vac_BA1)

Each experimental group had 5 mice. Each murine sample was analyzed at baseline, or following a 6 hour stimulation with SARS-CoV-2 peptides to characterize SARS-CoV-2-specific T cells.

Each FCS file name b...