Unmasked, the team battling to crack Covid key
THEY are a team of fresh-faced and upbeat scientists – not that you’d know that under their full personal protective equipment.
The group of academics work at the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research, which has been at the forefront of studies into SARS-CoV-2 – the virus which causes Covid-19.
Now photographers have been given exclusive access to a containment level three (CL3) laboratory named after Professor Richard Elliott – who worked in the virology unit and sadly died just as the lab opened in 2015.
Housed in the Sir Michael Stoker Building, which opened in 2005 at the university’s Garscube campus, Angela Elliott and Joyce Mitchell manage a team working seven days a week studying the virus.
Last month alone, research at the centre showed the immune response from the common cold could offer some level of protection.
A team at the university found that human rhinoviruses, which cause colds, trigger a response in the respiratory tract, seemingly blocking Sars-CoV-2 replication.
Among the technology used in the lab is a fluorescent microscope that tracks which cells have been infected by a virus – and how it will spread over the coming hours or days. The microscope is a powerful tool to test different drugs or to assess the efficiency of different vaccines. The team, including head of genomics Dr Ana da Silva Filipe, determines the concentration of a virus by adding it to cells as they grow in a three-day process. All procedures are designed to avoid any accidental infection or contamination.
The team uses a 70 per cent alcohol disinfectant to sterilise equipment, and replace the outer gloves of their PPE with a new pair before transferring samples in prepared tubes to an incubator.
Once the team is sure each tube is clean, they then go into different containers that are never opened outside the safety cabinets in which they work.
The scientists also use a ‘GloMax’ machine, which helps speed up the process of gathering their results.