WIKIMEDIA, JAMES NILANDBats have a lot of viruses floating about in their bodies, but they don’t get sick like humans do. That could be because bats fly.
“We were interested [in] why and how bats’ immune systems could deal with so many deadly viruses,” Peng Zhou, a virologist at Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, tells The BBC.
Zhou and his colleagues reported yesterday (February 22) in Cell Host & Microbe that bats may have evolved to dampen certain immune pathways to have milder responses to viruses. The team focused on the stimulator of interferon genes, or STING, pathway, which plays a role in antiviral immunity by screening cells for free-floating DNA. In non-flying mammals, free-floating DNA is minimal, so if STING sensor molecules detect it, they send a flood of interferons to the cells.
Flying, however, takes effort and, in turn, releases a lot of free-floating DNA into bats’ cells. So ...
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