ABOVE: The Schmidt Ocean Institute’s research vessel Falkor
SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE
One way the mammalian immune system defends against pathogens known and novel is by picking up on common microbial features, such as elements of bacterial cell walls or flagella. But a study published today (March 12) in Science Immunology indicates that this detection system has some blind spots. The authors found that the majority of microbes collected from the depths of the Pacific Ocean are invisible to mammalian immune cells, despite the presence of familiar bacterial cell wall component lipopolysaccharide (LPS).
This work “implies that there’s a lot more potential for a pathogen to escape our immune responses than we had previously thought,” says Christopher LaRock, an immunologist at Emory University School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. The bacterium Yersinia pestis, which causes plague, can modify its LPS, thus escaping immune detection, he adds. “We thought ...
