Congrats, Maya on a wonderful thesis defense! You killed it!
Archives for September 2023
Are you sick of COVID?????….
….well we are too! That didn’t stop Tatsuya Tsukahara and David Brann in the lab from writing this excellent review about how COVID can cost you your sense of smell. This work is evolving rapidly – as you can see from the review, there are some things we are sure about (COVID doesn’t directly infect sensory neurons but instead infects support cells), some things we are pretty skeptical about (COVID directly infects neurons in the brain), and a ton we don’t know (especially about how infection of support cells ultimately yields a loss of the sense of smell, and why smell recovers at the rate it does.). More to follow from us and colleagues, but our bet is that looking at humans is going to be more informative that what we learn from transgenic rodent models (that ectopically express e.g., the COVID receptor ACE2) going forward.