They then used snazzy laser microscopy to peer into the inner workings of the mouse , equal to of penetrating about a mm deep . And what they visualized was pretty larger-than-life :
Our immune system can be both a thanksgiving and a bane . In HIV for good example , cells that help pioneer immunity to this computer virus also end upworseningthe situation by inadvertently playing perish the parcel , transferring infectious atom to susceptible fair game cells that were actually attempting rectify theinsult .
We know quite a hatful about processes such as these from studying cells in a dish , which can be done in a rather sophisticated manner using fancy optical maser microscopes and fluorescent dyes that stain scrap of the virus and host prison cell . While invaluable to our understanding of the outgrowth of transmission , in vitrostudies such as these are limited in that they do n’t needfully reflect what rifle on in the consistency . For starters , your resistant system is much more complex than one or two isolated cell type packed into a flaskful : there is a whole emcee of different component part that interact and communicate in the physical structure .
As described inScience , they found that the process of dissemination begins with computer virus being captured by a type of immune cellular phone called amacrophage , which usually scouts the organic structure in hunting of invaders to bolt up . These virus - laden cells then form connections , calledsynapses , with a different type of resistant jail cell called a boron cell . It is through these lank structures that the computer virus gets passed between the prison cell , a cognitive operation know astrans - infection . These freshly - infect B cells then migrate into the lymph guest , circulate the virus further and establishing infection .
This research is , of course , about more than making pretty film and picture . The scientists are promising that these insights could lead to a new mode to immobilise the spread of HIV , perhaps by using particle to prevent the virus from attaching to macrophages in the first place .
