Author: Leah Rosenbaum / Source: Science News
Conventional wisdom states that viruses work as lone soldiers. Scientists now report that some viruses also clump together in vesicles, or membrane-bound sacs, before an invasion.
Compared with solo viruses, these viral “Trojan horses” caused more severe infections in mice, researchers report August 8 in Cell Host & Microbe.Cell biologist Nihal Altan-Bonnet had been involved in discovering in 2015 that polioviruses can cluster together to invade cells in a petri dish. In the new study, Altan-Bonnet and a different group of colleagues find that transmission via virus clumps also occurs naturally with both rotavirus and norovirus, which can cause gastrointestinal illness.
The scientists first identified norovirus cluster vesicles in patients’ stool samples, which was “eye-opening,” says Altan-Bonnet, who works at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. “We can see these vesicles everywhere.”
Altan-Bonnet and her team infected live mice with either vesicle-packaged rotavirus or equal amounts of single virus particles. Vesicles were not only more successful in causing infections, they also caused infections that were more severe, the researchers found. In the mice, it took five times the amount of single virus particles to cause the same severity of infection as caused by the clustered viruses. It also took the mice two to…
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