Claudia Claus

Leipzig University · Institut für Virologie

Uveitis is a process of intraocular inflammation that may involve different sections of the uveal tract. Apart from systemic or localized immune-mediated diseases, infections are key players in the etiology of uveitis and entail different treatment strategies. Rubella virus (RuV) is a recognized causative agent for the development of Fuchs uveitis,...

Vertical transmission of rubella virus (RuV) occurs at a high rate during the first trimester of pregnancy. The modes of vertical transmission including the response of trophoblasts to RuV are not well understood. Here, RuV-trophoblast interaction was studied in the BeWo trophoblast cell line. Analysis included early and late time-point kinetics of...

Rubella virus (RuV) infection during pregnancy can lead to abortion, stillbirth, and embryonic defects, resulting in congenital rubella syndrome (CRS). It is estimated that there are still 100,000 cases of CRS per year in developing regions with a mortality rate of over 30%. The molecular pathomechanisms remain largely unexplored. Placental endothe...

Late-onset Alzheimer disease (LOAD) is the most frequent neurodegenerative disease, and the APOE ε4 allele is the most prominent risk factor for LOAD. Four human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines MLUi007-J, MLUi008-B, MLUi009-A, and MLUi010-B were generated from LOAD patients and healthy matched donors by reprogramming of B-lymphoblastoid...

Usutu virus (USUV) is an emerging mosquito-borne arbovirus within the genus Fla-vivirus, family Flaviviridae. Similar to the closely related West Nile virus (WNV), USUV infections are capable of causing mass mortality in wild and captive birds, especially blackbirds. In the last few years, a massive spread of USUV was present in the avian populatio...

Viruses are the cause of a considerable burden to human, animal and plant health, while on the other hand playing an important role in regulating entire ecosystems. The power of new sequencing technologies combined with new tools for processing “Big Data” offers unprecedented opportunities to answer fundamental questions in virology. Virologists ha...

Interferons (IFNs) are an essential part of innate immunity and contribute to adaptive immune responses. Here, we employed a loss-of-function analysis with human A549 respiratory epithelial cells with a knockout (KO) of the type I IFN receptor (IFNAR KO), either solely or together with the receptor of type III IFN (IFNAR/IFNLR1 KO). The course of r...

The mosquito-borne Usutu virus (USUV) is a zoonotic flavivirus and an emerging pathogen. So far therapeutical options or vaccines are not available in human and veterinary medicine. The bioenergetic profile based on extracellular flux analysis revealed an USUV infection-associated significant increase in basal and stressed glycolysis on Vero and wi...

Macrophages (MΦ) as specialized immune cells are involved in rubella virus (RuV) pathogenesis and enable the study of its interaction with the innate immune system. A similar replication kinetics of RuV in the two human MΦ types, the pro-inflammatory M1-like (or GM-MΦ) and anti-inflammatory M2-like (M-MΦ), was especially in M-MΦ accompanied by a re...

Macrophages (MΦ) are known to exhibit distinct responses to viral and bacterial infection, but how they react when exposed to the pathogens in succession is less well understood. Accordingly, we determined the effect of a rubella virus (RV)-induced infection followed by an LPS-induced challenge on cytokine production, signal transduction and metabo...

Lipid structures, such as liposomes or micelles, are of high interest as an approach to support the transport and delivery of active agents as a drug delivery system. However, there are many open questions regarding their uptake and impact on cellular metabolism. In this study, lipid structures were assembled as a supported lipid bilayer on top of...

The association of members of the enterovirus family with pregnancy complications up to miscarriages is under discussion. Here, infection of two different human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines and iPSC-derived primary germ-layer cells with coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) was characterized as an in vitro cell culture model for very early human d...

The rubella virus (RV) was the first virus shown to be teratogenic in humans. The wealth of data on the clinical symptoms associated with congenital rubella syndrome is in stark contrast to an incomplete understanding of the forces leading to the teratogenic alterations in humans. This applies not only to RV, but also to congenital viral infections...

The efficient application of smart drug delivery systems requires further improvement of their cellular uptake and in particular their release from endolysosomal compartments into the cytoplasm of target cells. The usage of virus proteins allows for such developments, as viruses have evolved efficient entry mechanisms into the cell, mediated by the...

The study of congenital virus infections in humans requires suitable ex vivo platforms for the species-specific events during embryonal development. A prominent example for these infections is rubella virus (RV) which most commonly leads to defects in ear, heart, and eye development. We applied teratogenic RV to human induced pluripotent stem cells...

Background Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disease. Causes include environmental and genetic factors. Characteristics of schizophrenia include a deregulation of the glutamatergic and the GABAergic neurotransmission and the degeneration of predominantly inhibitory interneurons. Recently, 108 loci referring to Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (S...

Rubella virus (RV) infection impacts cellular metabolic activity in a complex manner with strain-specific nutritional requirements. Here we addressed whether this differential metabolic influence was associated with differences in oxidative stress induction and subsequently with innate immune response activation. The low passaged clinical isolates...

The cellular cytoskeleton is central for key cellular functions, and as such is a marker for diseased and infected cell states. Here we analyzed infection with rubella virus (RV) strains with respect to phenotypes in cellular mechanical properties, cell movement, and viral cytopathogenicity. Real-time deformability cytometry (RT-DC), as a high-thro...

For the efficient treatment of an increasing number of diseases the development of new therapeutics as well as novel drug delivery systems is essential. Such drug delivery systems (DDS) must not only consider biodegradability and protective packaging but must also target and control the release of active substances, which is one of the most importa...

RV pathologies, especially during embryonal development, could be connected with its impact on mitochondrial metabolism. With bioenergetic phenotyping we pursued a rather novel approach in virology. For the first time it was shown that a virus infection could shift the bioenergetics of its infected host cell to a higher energetic state. Notably, th...

Human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines are a promising model for the early phase of human embryonic development. Here, their contribution to the still incompletely understood pathogenesis of congenital virus infections was evaluated. The infection of iPSC lines with miscarriage-associated coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3) and measles virus (MV) wa...

Although teratogenic rubella virus (RV) causes a vaccine-preventable disease, it is still endemic in several countries worldwide. Thus, there is a constant risk of RV importation into non-endemic areas. RV monitoring, especially during measles and Zika virus outbreaks, requires reliable diagnostic tools. For this study, a TaqMan-based one-step reve...

Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have the ability to differentiate in any specialized somatic cell type, which makes them an attractive tool for a wide variety of scientific approaches, including regenerative medicine. However, their pluripotent state and their growth in compact colonies render them difficult to access and, therefore, restric...

Background Rubella virus (RV) infection is usually a mild illness in children and adults. However, maternal infection during the first trimester of pregnancy can lead to congenital rubella syndrome (CRS) in the infant. Fetuses with CRS show damage to the endothelium of the heart and blood vessels; thus, it has been speculated that the clinical mani...

Mitochondria- as well as p53-based signaling pathways are central for the execution of the intrinsic apoptotic cascade. Their contribution to rubella virus (RV)-induced apoptosis was addressed through time-specific evaluation of characteristic parameters such as permeabilization of the mitochondrial membrane and subsequent release of the pro-apopto...

Layer-by-Layer (LbL) coated microcarriers provide a multifunctional drug delivery system for therapeutic substances into specific cells. Inflammatory cells as polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNs) represent a particularly promising target for LbL-microcarriers transporting anti-inflammatory substances such as α1-antitrypsin (AT). They facilitate a lo...

Herpesviral capsids are assembled in the host cell nucleus before being translocated into the cytoplasm for further maturation. The crossing of the nuclear envelope represents a major event that requires formation of the nuclear egress complex (NEC). Previous studies demonstrated that human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) proteins pUL50 and pUL53, as well a...

Mitochondria fulfil several key functions within cellular metabolic and antiviral signalling pathways, including their central role in ATP generation. Viruses, as intracellular parasites, require from their cellular host the building blocks for generation of their viral progeny and the energy that drives viral replication and assembly. While some v...

Mitochondria are important for the viral life cycle, mainly by providing the energy required for viral replication and assembly. A highly complex interaction with mitochondria is exerted by rubella virus (RV), which includes an increase in the mitochondrial membrane potential as a general marker for mitochondrial activity. This study aims at provid...

Rubella virus (RUBV) contains a plus-strand RNA genome with two ORFs, one encoding the non-structural replicase proteins (NS-ORF) and the second encoding the virion structural proteins (SP-ORF). This study describes development and use of a trans-encapsidation system for the assembly of infectious RUBV-like replicon particles (VRPs) containing RUBV...

The interaction of the rubella virus (RV) capsid (C) protein and the mitochondrial p32 protein is believed to participate in virus replication. In this study, the physiological significance of the association of RV with mitochondria was investigated by silencing p32 through RNA interference. It was demonstrated that downregulation of p32 interferes...

Reference genes are generally employed in real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) experiments to normalize variability between different samples. The aim of this study was to identify and validate appropriate reference genes as internal controls for RT-qPCR experiments in rubella virus (RV)-infected Vero and MCF-7 cell lines using SYBR green fluoresce...

During serial passaging of rubella virus (RUB) in cell culture, the dominant species of defective-interfering RNA (DI) generated contains an in-frame deletion between the capsid protein (C) gene and E1 glycoprotein gene resulting in production of a C-E1 fusion protein that is necessary for the maintenance of the DI [Tzeng, W.P., Frey, T.K. (2006)....

For the first time, homologous superinfection exclusion was documented for rubella virus (RUB) by using Vero cells harbouring persisting RUB replicons. Infection with wild-type RUB was reduced by tenfold, whereas Sindbis virus infection was unaffected. Replication following infection with packaged replicons and transfection with replicon transcript...

The rubivirus Rubella virus contains the two envelope glycoproteins E2 and E1 as a heterodimeric spike complex embedded in its lipid envelope. The functions of both proteins, especially of E2, in the process of viral entry are still not entirely understood. In order to dissect E2 and E1 entry functions from post-entry steps, pseudotypes of lentivir...

Cover: Silica particles can be coated layerwise with polyelectrolytes. Using the plasmid encoding the green fluorescent protein (pEGFP‐C1) as a layer constituent particle uptake, release of particles into cytoplasm and defoliation of the polyelectrolyte multilayer are demonstrated by GFP expression in HEK 293T cells. Further details can be found in...

The uptake of polyelectrolyte multilayer coated colloids into cells, subsequent defoliation and plasmid delivery was studied by means of confocal microscopy and flow cytometry. Silica particles coated layer‐wise with protamine and dextran sulfate were given to HEK 293T cells. Optimum uptake was found with protamine as the top layer. The particle up...