Microglia regulate Zika virus infection in human developing brain and glioma

This paper shows that, whereas SOX2+ cells in HDB are highly susceptible to ZKV, SOX2+ primary GBM samples exhibit moderate to high resistance to infection. These datasets address the reasons for this difference, based on infection of primary patient GBM and human developing brain samples with mCherry Zika reporter virus, then FACS sorting the Zika-mCherry positive and negative fractions from each sample for bulk RNA-Sequencing. The primary finding of importance is that Zika resistant GBMs exhibit an immune signature reflecting high levels of infiltration by microglia which are present only in small numbers or absent altogether in human developing brain. These bulk RNA-Sequencing libraries were generated from primary patient glioblastoma tumour cells and human developing brain cells, infected with Zika-mCherry reporter virus and then FACS sorted for mCherry positive and negative fractions.