Anyone prone to viral infection would assume that getting inside a host is a cakewalk. But it’s actually more like an obstacle course: a race to engage receptors at the cell’s surface without getting wiped out by the organism’s natural defences. The most common type of the flu, influenza A virus, accomplishes this feat by using separate binding and cleaving proteins to avoid immobilization by the host’s mucus. Now, Michael Vahey and Daniel Fletcher have determined that its success may be attributed to the spatial organization of these proteins within the viral envelope.
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In hosts, the virus has a filamentous form that differs from the spherical morphology of laboratory strains. Vahey and Fletcher showed that in the filamentous particles, the binding and cleaving proteins are asymmetrically distributed. Invoking a Brownian ratchet mechanism, they found that this distribution could result in persistent motion — allowing the virus to penetrate the host’s mucus without compromising its ability to engage receptors on the cell surface.
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Klopper, A. How to go viral. Nat. Phys. 15, 522 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0555-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-019-0555-z
