Viruses Plan Attacks
Together
Viruses Plan Attacks
Together
Viruses may
be stealthy invaders, but an Israeli study reveals a new, chatty side of some.
For the
first time, viruses have been “caught” communicating with one another.
This
communication – short “posts” left for kin and descendant viruses – helps the
viruses “reading” them to decide how to proceed with the process of infection.
According to
the study, during infection, viruses secrete small molecules into their
environment that other viruses can pick up and “read.”
In this way,
they can actually coordinate their attack, turning simple messages into fairly
sophisticated infection strategies.
In the
future, this discovery could lead to new anti-viral treatments.
Ebola Virus |
Conducted at Israel’s Weizman Institute pf
Science, and recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature,
the study reveals that many
viruses face a choice after they have infected their hosts: to replicate
quickly, killing the cell in the process, or to become dormant and wait.
HIV, herpes and a number of other human viruses
behave this way and, in fact, even the viruses that attack bacteria – called
phages, or bacteriophage – face similar decisions when invading a cell.
Interestingly, Prof. Rotem Sorek and his
team at the Weizmann Institute discovered the communications between phages
almost by accident.
“We were looking for communication between
bacteria infected by phages, but we realized that the small molecules we found
had been sent by the phages themselves,” he said in
a statement.
To find evidence for this communication, the
team grew bacteria in culture and infected them with phages; they then filtered
the bacteria and phages out of the culture, leaving only the smallest molecules
that had been released to the medium.
When they grew more bacteria on the filtered
medium, infecting them with the same phages, they were surprised to find that
the new phages became dormant rather than killing the bacteria.
The team isolated the communication molecule,
eventually discovering that it is a small piece of protein called a peptide;
they also identified the gene encoding it.
They found that in the presence of high
concentrations of this peptide, phages choose the dormancy strategy, so they
named it “arbitrium,” the Latin word for decision.
Don’t
get too gung-ho
“At the beginning of infection, it makes sense for the viruses to
take the fast-replication, kill-the-host route,” explains Sorek, “but if they
are too gung-ho, there won’t be any hosts left for future generations of
viruses to infect.”
At some point, the viruses need to switch
strategies and become dormant, he says.
This molecule enables each generation of
viruses to communicate with successive generations by adding to concentrations
of the arbitrium molecule.
Each virus can then ‘count’ how many previous
viruses have succeeded in infecting host cells and thus decide which strategy
is best at any point in time.
Prof. Rotem Sorek |
Once they had identified this communication
molecule in one phage, the researchers were able to find similar molecules in
dozens of related phages – each phage encoding a slightly different
communication molecule.
“We deciphered a phage-specific communication
code. It is as if each phage species broadcasts on a specific molecular
‘frequency’ that can be ‘read’ by phages of its own kind, but not by other
phages,” says Sorek.
He points
out that the communication-based dormancy strategy he discovered was found in
phages, but it may have broader implications. “We don’t really know how viruses that infect the human body decide to
go dormant. It is possible that a similar strategy to that of the phages could
be used by viruses that infect us.”
If the viruses that infect humans are found to
communicate with one another in a similar manner, we might learn to intercept
these messages and use them to our advantage, possibly creating new kinds of
anti-viral drugs.
RELATED POSTS:
.
.
CLICK HERE . . .
CLICK HERE . . .
CLICK HERE . . .
CLICK HERE . . .
CLICK HERE . . .
CLICK HERE . . .
.
Multi-Media Filter, Highly-Activated Carbon Filter,
Zeolite-Process Water Softener With Brine Tank,
Fiberglass Ballast-Type Pressure Tank
(fully automatic backwash & regeneration)
|
PURICARE
Water
Treatment
Systems
.
.
...
Aganan, Pavia, Iloilo, Philippines
...
CLICK HERE . . . to view company profile . . .
CLICK HERE . . . to view company profile . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment