{"doi":"10.1016/j.stemcr.2021.01.016","title":"SARS-CoV-2 targets glial cells in human cortical organoids","abstract":"Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients have manifested a variety of neurological complications, and there is still much to reveal regarding the neurotropism of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Human stem cell-derived brain organoids offer a valuable in vitro approach to study the cellular effects of SARS-CoV-2 on the brain. Here we used human embryonic stem cell-derived cortical organoids to investigate whether SARS-CoV-2 could infect brain tissue in vitro and found that cortical organoids could be infected at low viral titers and within 6 h. Importantly, we show that glial cells and cells of the choroid plexus were preferentially targeted in our model, but not neurons. Interestingly, we also found expression of angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 in SARS-CoV-2 infected cells; however, viral replication and cell death involving DNA fragmentation does not occur. We believe that our model is a tractable platform to study the cellular effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection in brain tissue.","journal":"Stem Cell Reports","year":2021,"id":150176,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":96,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9579,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":225363,"name":"Hilary Staples","orcid":"0000-0001-5996-1357","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":229222,"name":"Michal Gaži","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":225367,"name":"Ricardo Carrion","orcid":"0000-0001-7046-7683","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":473321,"name":"Jenny Hsieh","orcid":"0000-0003-0214-0771","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":576816,"name":"Courtney L. McMahon","orcid":"0000-0002-3523-6529","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":52,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:43:01.325389Z","pmid":"33979600","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}