Methods for Evaluating Neurotropic Viral Infections: Exploring Zika and Coronavirus Diseases

Emerging infections represent a major challenge for public health due to the urgent need to develop efficient clinical protocols in a scenario with few available scientific studies. The experience with Zika virus (ZIKV) shares important points with the COVID-19 pandemic, since both viruses are associated with community transmission, limited diagnostics, significant perinatal neurological risks, prognostic uncertainty, and lack of effective therapies. Zika virus and SARS-CoV-2 infect cells from the central nervous system causing neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration. Moreover, these neurotropic infections have been associated with several behavioral manifestations including depression. Therefore, the development of murine models to better understand the short- and long-term effects of neurotropic infections is desirable. In this chapter, we describe several methods to study neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in mice infected with Zika and betacoronavirus (murine hepatitis virus, MHV) in biosafety level 2 environments. The described strategies encompass techniques from viral inoculum preparation and infection, to textual and visual descriptions of tissue collection at euthanasia, as well as histopathological and behavioral analyses.