University of Tennessee Health Science Center UTHSC Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations (ETD) College of Graduate Health Sciences 6-2020 Understanding Human Astrovirus from Pathogenesis to Treatment Virginia Hargest University of Tennessee Health Science Center Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uthsc.edu/dissertations Part of the Diseases Commons, Medical Sciences Commons, and the Viruses Commons Recommended Citation Hargest, Virginia (0000-0003-3883-1232), "Understanding Human Astrovirus from Pathogenesis to Treatment" (2020). Theses and Dissertations (ETD). Paper 523. http://dx.doi.org/10.21007/ etd.cghs.2020.0507. This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Graduate Health Sciences at UTHSC Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations (ETD) by an authorized administrator of UTHSC Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Understanding Human Astrovirus from Pathogenesis to Treatment Abstract While human astroviruses (HAstV) were discovered nearly 45 years ago, these small positive-sense RNA viruses remain critically understudied. These studies provide fundamental new research on astrovirus pathogenesis and disruption of the gut epithelium by induction of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) following astrovirus infection. Here we characterize HAstV-induced EMT as an upregulation of SNAI1 and VIM with a down regulation of CDH1 and OCLN, loss of cell-cell junctions most notably at 18 hours post-infection (hpi), and loss of cellular polarity by 24 hpi. While active transforming growth factor- (TGF-) increases during HAstV infection, inhibition of TGF- signaling does not hinder EMT induction. However, HAstV-induced EMT does require active viral replication.