Flu/RSV Coinfection Produces Hybrid Virus that Evades Immune Defenses

When fused to RSV, influenza A virus is better able to escape antibodies that usually neutralize it, an in vitro study finds.

Written byCatherine Offord

| 2 min read

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Flu particles (pink) and RSV filaments (green) bud from the surface of a human lung cell (yellow).

Image credit:Image courtesy of Margaret Mullin and Joanne Haney, University of Glasgow

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Many respiratory viral infections involve more than one type of virus, but the cellular dynamics of these coinfections and their effects on human health are often unclear. Now, a team has shown that two common respiratory viruses—influenza A virus (IAV) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV)—can fuse to form a hybrid that better evades certain antibodies in vitro. The findings were published yesterday (October 24) in Nature Microbiology.

“This was an unexpected but very exciting discovery that challenges what we know about how viral particles are formed within a cell,” study coauthor Pablo Murcia of the MRC-University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research says in a press statement.

To understand the effects of coinfection in vitro, the team infected human lung cells with IAV and RSV simultaneously. Using microscopy and live-cell imaging, the researchers found that viruses combined to form filamentous structures containing some bits from IAV and some bits from ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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