Epilepsy is one of the three most prevalent neurological disorders. A significant proportion of patients suffering from epilepsy can be effectively treated if their seizures are detected in a timely manner. However, detection of most seizures requires the attention of trained neurologists—a scarce resource. Therefore, there is a need for an automatic seizure detection capability. A tunable non-patient-specific, non-seizure-specific method is proposed to detect the presence and locality of a seizure using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. This multifaceted computational approach is based on a network model of the brain and a distance metric based on the spectral profiles of EEG signals. This computationally time-efficient and cost-effective automated epileptic seizure detection algorithm has a median latency of 8 s, a median sensitivity of 83%, and a median false alarm rate of 2.9%. Hence, it is capable of being used in portable EEG devices to aid in the process of detecting and monitoring epileptic patients.

The Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) is an important oncogenic virus previously shown to be neurotropic, but studies on neuronal cells infection and pathogenesis are still very limited. Here we characterized the effects of KSHV infection on neuronal SH-SY5Y cells by the recombinant virus rKSHV219, which expresses both GFP and RFP to reflect latent and lytic phases of infection. We demonstrated that infected cells have a faster growth rate and the KSHV infection can be sustained. Interestingly, the infected cells can transition spontaneously back and forth between lytic and latent phases of infections, producing progeny viruses but without any adverse effects on cell growth. In addition, transcriptome analysis of viral and cellular genes in latent and lytic cells showed that unlike other infected cell lines, the latently infected cells expressed both latent and most, but not all the lytic genes required for infectious virion production. The uniquely expressed viral genes by the lytic cells were mainly involved in the early steps of virus binding. Some of the cellular genes that were deregulated in both latent and lytically infected cells are involved in cell adhesion, in cell signal pathways and tumorigenesis. The downregulated cellular CCDN1, PAX5, NFASC and upregulated CTGF, BMP4, YAP1, LEF1 and HLA-DRB1 genes were found to be associated with the cell adhesion molecules (CAM), hippo signaling and cancer. These deregulated genes may be involved in creating an environment that are unique in the neuronal cells to sustain cell growth upon KSHV infection not observed in other infected cell types. IMPORTANCE Our study has provided evidence that the neuronal SH-SY5Y cells displayed unique cellular responses upon KSHV infection. Unlike other infected cells, this neuronal cell displayed a more rapid growth rate upon infection and can spontaneously transition back and forth between latent and lytic phases of infection. Unlike other latently infected cells, a number of lytic genes were also expressed in the latent phase of infection in addition to the established latent viral genes. They may play a role in deregulating a number of host genes that are involved in cell signaling and tumorigenesis in order to sustain the infection and growth advantages for the cells. Our study has provided novel insights on KSHV infection of neuronal cells and a potential new model for further studies to explore the underlying mechanism in viral and host interaction for neuronal cells, and the association of KSHV with neuronal diseases.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract