Viruses act as decoys, study finds, helping bacteria evade the immune system
A paper published Thursday found that viruses can tag-team with bacteria to trick the human immune system by providing a decoy.
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
