Bacteria deploy viruses to trick the immune system
/Viruses act as decoys, study finds, helping bacteria evade the immune system
Eric Boodman, Stat News
These viruses weren’t supposed to affect humans. They were supposed to ride along inside bacteria — unobtrusive hitchhikers taking advantage of another microbe’s machinery. But that wasn’t what Dr. Paul Bollyky and his colleagues saw in their lab dishes three or four years ago. The viruses seemed to be changing the behavior of human immune cells. Instead of gobbling up bacteria as they normally did, white blood cells just sat there.
“They basically don’t eat anything. They don’t move around much either,” said Bollyky, an immunologist and infectious disease specialist at Stanford University. “They would just ignore … the bacteria that were in the dish with them.”
Now, with a paper published Thursday in Science, what began as a chance observation has yielded a startling window into the inner lives of infections — one in which viruses tag-team with bacteria to trick the immune system by providing a decoy. Bollyky describes it as having someone trip the fire alarm so that the rest of the team can pull off a robbery in the chaos that ensues.
