Guokai Chen

Century. Besides the acute symptoms after infection, patients and society are also being challenged by the long-term health complications associated with COVID-19, commonly known as long COVID. While health professionals work hard to find proper treatments, large amount of knowledge has been accumulated in recent years. In order to deal with long COVID efficiently, it is important for people to keep up with current progresses and take proactive actions on long COVID. For this purpose, this review will first introduce the general background of long COVID, and then discuss its risk factors, diagnostic indicators and management strategies. This review will serve as a useful resource for people to understand and prepare for long COVID that will be with us in the foreseeable future.

Social amoebae feed on bacteria in the soil but aggregate when starved to form a migrating slug. We describe a previously unknown cell type in the social amoeba, which appears to provide detoxification and immune-like functions and which we term sentinel (S) cells. S cells were observed to engulf bacteria and sequester toxins while circulating within the slug, eventually being sloughed off. A Toll/interleukin-1 receptor (TIR) domain protein, TirA, was also required for some S cell functions and for vegetative amoebae to feed on live bacteria. This apparent innate immune function in social amoebae, and the use of TirA for bacterial feeding, suggest an ancient cellular foraging mechanism that may have been adapted to defense functions well before the diversification of the animals.