Lin Shuhai's research group co-published research papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences to identify new regulatory ...

Since the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, Lin Shuhai's research group has carried out a series of metabolic-related studies, and has cooperated to identify metabolic markers at different stages of the onset of new crown pneumonia (National Science Review 2020), as well as signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy anomaly analysis of milk proteins and metabolites in women with new crown pneumonia (Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy 2020).

On August 9, Lin Shuhai's research group published a research paper
entitled Plasma metabolome and cytokine profile reveal glycylproline modulating antibody fading in convalescent COVID-19 patients in PNAS 。 The study identified glycylproline (Gly-pro) accumulating in the plasma of people who recovered from COVID-19 by conducting plasma metabolomics in people who recovered from COVID-19, and then found that glycylproline can regulate the level
of new crown antibodies.

In this research work, Lin Shuhai's research group and the cooperative team collected plasma specimens of antibodies carried by subjects who recovered from COVID-19, subjects who recovered from COVID-19 but antibodies regressed and healthy volunteers to carry out quantitative analysis
of targeted metabolomics and inflammatory factors 。 The results found that the concentration of glycylproline in the plasma of healthy volunteers was 0.

Since glycylproline can be produced catalytically by DPP4, the use of sitagliptin (DPP4 inhibitor) can reduce the level
of glycylproline.

Therefore, the researchers used SARS-CoV-2 RBD protein fragments to inject BALB/c female mice intraperitoneally and detected immune cell subsets (GC B cells in the germination center), follicular helper T cells (Tfh) and plasma cells) to elucidate that glycylproline can modulate the antibody immune response
。 It was found that injection of glycylproline or N-benzyloxycarbonyl-L-proline could significantly downregulate the level of immune cell subsets, but the combined administration of glycylproline and DPP4 inhibitor sitagliptin could reverse the negative effects
of glycylproline.

This study showed that there were significant differences in the concentration of glycylproline in plasma in subjects with different levels of COVID-19 antibodies, and that the neutralization antibody levels of mammalian vaccination against COVID-19 were indeed regulated by glycinylproline, suggesting that glycylproline could be used as a candidate to identify or distinguish between different antibody levels of COVID-19 vaccine.

Lin Shuhai, Shang You of Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital, Cai Zongwei of Hong Kong Baptist University and Zhou Xi, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, are co-corresponding authors
.

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