Although they globally cause viral gastroenteritis in children, astroviruses are understudied due to the lack of well-defined animal models. While murine astroviruses (muAstVs) chronically infect immunodeficient mice, a culture system and understanding of their pathogenesis is lacking. Here, we describe a platform to cultivate muAstV using air-liquid interface (ALI) cultures derived from mouse enteroids, which support apical infection and release. Chronic muAstV infection occurs predominantly in the small intestine and correlates with higher interferon-lambda (IFN-λ) expression. MuAstV stimulates IFN-λ production in ALI, recapitulating our in vivo findings. We demonstrate that goblet cells and enterocytes are targets for chronic muAstV infection in vivo , and that infection is enhanced by parasite coinfection or type 2 cytokine signaling. Depletion of goblet cells from ALI limits muAstV infection in vitro. During chronic infection, muAstV stimulates IFN-λ production in infected cells and induces ISGs throughout the intestinal epithelium in an IFN-λ-receptor dependent manner. Collectively, our study provides insights into the cellular tropism and innate immune responses to muAstV and establishes an enteroid-based culture system to propagate muAstV in vitro .

Vancomycin is a glycopeptide antibiotic used against multi-drug resistant gram-positive bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Although invaluable against resistant bacteria, vancomycin harbors adverse drug reactions including cytopenia, ototoxicity, as well as nephrotoxicity. Since nephrotoxicity is a rarely occurring side effect, its mechanism is incompletely understood. Only recently, the actual clinically relevant concentration the in kidneys of patients receiving vancomycin was investigated and were found to exceed plasma concentrations by far. We applied these clinically relevant vancomycin concentrations to murine and canine renal epithelial cell lines and assessed metabolic and lipidomic alterations by untargeted and targeted gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry analyses. Despite marked differences in the lipidome, both cell lines increased anabolic glucose reactions, resulting in higher sorbitol and lactate levels. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first endometabolic profiling of kidney cells exposed to clinically relevant vancomycin concentrations. The presented study will provide a valuable dataset to nephrotoxicity researchers and might add to unveiling the nephrotoxic mechanism of vancomycin.

Interferon-l (IFN-l) plays an important role in mucosal immunity, but reliable information regarding the expression of the IFN-l receptor in individual cells is still missing. One reason for this knowledge gap is the lack of antibodies that specifically recognize the unique IFNLR1 subunit of the dimeric IFN-l receptor complex. In this study, we investigated whether a reporter mouse carrying a bacterial b-galactosidase gene inserted into the Ifnlr1 locus could be used to visualize IFN-l receptor-expressing cells in whole organs. First we confirmed that insertion of the reporter cassette inactivated the Ifnlr1 gene, and that gene function could be restored by removing the b-galactosidase insert by site-specific recombination. When whole tissues were analyzed, prominent b-galactosidase activity was confined to the intestinal tract of reporter mice. However, only the snout expressed b-galactosidase at levels high enough for reliable detection in whole tissue extracts. Interestingly, individual epithelial cells in the upper airways expressed b-galactosidase activity to variable degrees as determined by flow cytometry and histology, suggesting a remarkable heterogeneity in IFNLR1 expression levels. Taken together, our results demonstrate a surprisingly strong within-and cross-tissue heterogeneity of IFNLR1 expression that may have physiological implications.