As per a team of researchers in Brazil, the SARS-CoV-2 virus can not only infect tissues which produce salivary glands in our body but also turn them into reservoirs where it replicates. It helps understand why the COVID-19 virus is found abundantly in saliva, which resulted in the development of saliva-based diagnostic testing methods like the RT-PCR test. As per Bruno Fernandes Matuck, doctoral candidate at USP's Dental School, “This is the first report of a respiratory virus's capacity to infect and replicate in salivary glands. Until now it was thought that only viruses that cause highly prevalent diseases such as herpes used salivary glands as reservoirs. It found that two-thirds of the samples not just showed presence of the virus but also its replication in cells.

Source: dna July 08, 2021 05:48 UTC