Live Calcium Imaging of Virus-Infected Human Intestinal Organoid Monolayers Using Genetically Encoded Calcium Indicators

Through our work, we aim to understand how viruses disrupt signaling within the intestinal epithelium. We are particularly interested in understanding the ways in which virus-infected cells dysregulate neighboring uninfected cells to contribute to pathogenesis. We've recently discovered that rotavirus-infected cells release pulses of ADP, which dysregulates neighboring uninfected cells and facilitates viral spread and exacerbates disease.

While calcium imaging is very popular in fields like neuroscience, it has not been widely used to study epithelial biology or virology. This protocol offers an approach to adapt existing technologies and model systems to study calcium signaling and live virus-infected epithelial tissue. By engineering organoids to express genetically encoded calcium indicators, our approach allows for a consistent, reproducible long-term imaging in a model system that recapitulates the cellular diversity of the human intestinal epithelium.

We aim to understand the effects of virus-induced paracrine purinergic signaling for both the host and the virus. Our future work will also determine whether this type of signaling is broadly conserved across other viruses and whether the effects are similar.