(Press-News.org) Researchers have identified specific influenza targets that could be used to better protect Indigenous people from experiencing severe influenza disease through a universal, T cell-based vaccine.
In a collaboration with Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Menzies School of Health Research and CQUniversity, Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) researchers took a deep-dive look into how the immune system can protect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from severe influenza disease.
"We know that some populations are at high risk from severe influenza, and these include Indigenous people globally," said University of Melbourne Professor Katherine Kedzierska, Laboratory Head at the Doherty Institute.
"As many as 10 to 20 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people died of influenza during the 1919 pandemic, compared to less than one per cent mortality rate in non-Indigenous Australians. Hospitalisation and morbidity rates were also higher for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.
"Similarly, high adult mortalities (up to 100 per cent) were reported in some isolated Alaskan villages. Our research aims to harness immune responses to protect these high-risk populations."
The research team particularly focused on killer T cells and proteins called HLAs, important in determining immune responses to different pathogens.
HLA proteins vary across individuals and ethnicities. A specific HLA protein, named HLA-A*24:02, can be linked to more severe (or even fatal) outcomes of influenza. It is also highly prevalent in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as well as many other Indigenous populations around the world.
Using state-of-the-art antigen discovery technology at Monash University, Professor Anthony Purcell and Dr Patricia Illing identified small fragments of influenza (peptide antigens) that were subsequently screened by Dr Luca Hensen, a research officer at the Doherty Institute, who identified which of these fragments formed protective targets for killer CD8 T cells that are presented by HLA-A*24:02.
"We propose that a universal influenza vaccine could be developed using these targets to promote optimal killer CD8 T cell response in the context of HLA-A*24:02," Dr Hensen said.
"This could provide much better global protection and help prevent severe influenza disease and death in populations who are at higher risk."
Co-author, Associate Professor Steven Tong, Royal Melbourne Hospital Infectious Diseases Physician and Co-Lead of the Clinical Research Discipline at the Doherty Institute, said other factors that contribute to poorer outcomes in Indigenous populations need to be considered, including higher rates of chronic diseases and the importance of social determinants of health.
"These findings are a significant step forward in understanding the immune profile of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and enable us to put that in context with the other determinants contributing to a higher risk of severe influenza. It is critical that future T cell-based influenza vaccines are designed to also protect ethnic populations who experience a high burden of disease," Associate Professor Tong said.
CQUniversity researcher, Professor Adrian Miller, of the Jirrbal people of North Queensland, said Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were some of the most vulnerable when it came to influenza.
"The spread of influenza poses particular risks for isolated Indigenous communities," Professor Miller said.
"We hope that the findings from this research ultimately lead to a universal flu vaccine that will also protect Indigenous populations."
This project looked at samples from 127 participants from the LIFT (Looking Into influenza T-cell immunity) cohort based in the Northern Territory.
INFORMATION:
Peer review: Nature Communications 10.1038/s41467-021-23212-x
Funding: NHMRC, ARC
This study used human and mouse samples
Fields of opium poppies once bloomed where the Zurich Opera House underground garage now stands. Through a new analysis of archaeological seeds, researchers at the University of Basel have been able to bolster the hypothesis that prehistoric farmers throughout the Alps participated in domesticating the opium poppy.
Although known today primarily as the source of opium and opiates, the poppy is also a valuable food and medicinal plant. Its seeds can be used to make porridge and cooking oil. Unlike all other previously domesticated crops, which are assumed to ...
The research team, led by Academician GUO Guangcan from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, collaborating with LI Bo from Shangrao Normal University and CHEN Jingling from Nankai University, achieved the masking of optical quantum information. The researchers concealed quantum information into non-local quantum entangled states. The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Quantum information masking as one of the new information processing protocol transfers quantum information from a single quantum carrier to the quantum entangled state between multiple carriers avoiding the information ...
Fossils of land animals from South America have been found in the Antilles, but how did these animals get there? According to scientists from the CNRS, l'Université des Antilles, l'Université de Montpellier and d'Université Côte d'Azur, land emerged in this region and then disappeared beneath the waves for millions of years, explaining how some species were able to migrate to the Antilles. This study will be published in June 2021 issue in Earth-Science Reviews.
Fossils of land animals from the Antilles, including mammals and amphibians, have their closest relatives in South America. The crossing of the Caribbean Sea from South America was therefore possible, but how?
As swimming across the continent ...
Urban megaprojects tend to be the antithesis of good urban planning. They have a negative impact on local water systems, deprive local communities of water-related human rights, and their funders and sponsors have little accountability for their impact.
These are the findings of the University of Adelaide's Dr Scott Hawken from the School of Architecture and Built Environment who led a review of the impact of urban megaprojects on water justice in South East Asia.
"Urban megaprojects have severe implications for environmental processes," said Dr Hawken.
"They have a major impact on hydrological systems and during all phases of development affect water security and human ...
China's Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO)--one of the country's key national science and technology infrastructure facilities--has found a dozen ultra-high-energy (UHE) cosmic accelerators within the Milky Way. It has also detected photons with energies exceeding 1 peta-electron-volt (quadrillion electron-volts or PeV), including one at 1.4 PeV. The latter is the highest energy photon ever observed.
These findings overturn the traditional understanding of the Milky Way and open up an era of UHE gamma astronomy. These observations will prompt people to rethink the mechanism by which high-energy particles are generated and propagated in the Milky Way, and will encourage people to explore more deeply violent celestial phenomena and their physical processes ...
Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs), narrow strips of single-layer graphene, have interesting physical, electrical, thermal, and optical properties because of the interplay between their crystal and electronic structures. These novel characteristics have pushed them to the forefront in the search for ways to advance next-generation nanotechnologies.
While bottom-up fabrication techniques now allow the synthesis of a broad range of graphene nanoribbons that feature well-defined edge geometries, widths, and heteroatom incorporations, the question of whether or not structural disorder is present in these atomically precise GNRs, and to what extent, is still subject to debate. The answer to ...
Manufactured in a new process based on crystalline materials, these low-loss mirrors promise to open up completely new application areas, for example in optical respiratory gas analysis for early cancer detection or the detection of greenhouse gases. This work will be published in the current issue of the journal Optica.
In 2016 researchers at the LIGO laser interferometer succeeded in the first direct observation of gravitational waves, which had originally been predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916. A significant contribution to the observation of this wave-like propagation of disturbances in space-time, which was rewarded with the Nobel Prize a year later, was provided by the laser mirrors of the kilometer-long interferometer assembly. ...
Spintronics is an emerging technology for manufacturing electronic devices that take advantage of electron spin and its associated magnetic properties, instead of using the electrical charge of an electron, to carry information. Antiferromagnetic materials are attracting attention in spintronics, with the expectation of spin operations with higher stability. Unlike ferromagnetic materials, in which atoms align along the same direction like in the typical refrigerator magnets, magnetic atoms inside antiferromagnets have antiparallel spin alignments that cancel out the net magnetization.
Scientists have worked on controlling the alignment of magnetic atoms within antiferromagnetic ...
In today's plants, photorespiration dissipates some of the energy produced by photosynthesis and releases CO2. It begins when the enzyme RuBisCO acts on oxygen instead of carbon dioxide and creates toxic side-products requiring costly recycling reactions. The detoxification process uses up fixed carbon and wastes energy, thus strongly limiting agricultural productivity.
Scientists generally pursue two approaches to minimizes the deleterious effects of photorespiration: mimic the carbon concentrating mechanism of C4 plants or introduce new metabolic pathways to bypass the photorespiration.
Researchers led by Andreas Weber from Heinrich ...
In a recent research, researchers led by Prof. ZHANG Haimin from the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science (HFIPS) realized the synthesis of Mo single atoms anchored on activated carbon (Mo-SAs/AC) by the formed Mo-Ox bonds. The result was published on Chemical Communications.
According to the researchers, this new oxygen-coordinated molybdenum single atom catalyst was proved efficient to electrosynthesis of ammonia. The O-coordinated environment in this study, different from N-coordinated environment reported before, provided the sites to anchor Mo single atoms and form Mo-Ox sites, which could be used as the active centers for the adsorption and activation of N2, resulting in high ...
