Detecting the Enemy Within

A virus, so to speak, “goes native”, writes Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Song of the Cell, i.e., it infiltrates the cell and hijacks the cell’s protein making apparatus to manufacture viral proteins.

 

This raises an intriguing question – since antibodies “cannot enter cells” (the cell membrane prevents them from entering), how then do they identify which cells have been infected?

 

If the antibody couldn’t “peek” inside the cell, was the viral protein coming out of the cell? Nope, that wasn’t the case either. The mystery only deepened – how then were the antibodies identifying which cell was infected?

 

The answer was found only in the 1980’s. Any cell, as we know, produces energy by processing the food we eat. And like every process in the universe, this produces waste by-products.

“The cell’s meat grinder – the proteasome - … then chews them (the waste, including the viral protein) into smaller pieces.”

The waste of course has to be ejected from the cell. And, as we just saw, that waste includes small pieces of the viral protein. It is these ejected chunks of the viral protein that the antibodies “sniff” to identify that there’s an intruder in the cell. And then the antibodies move in for the kill.

 

Fascinating. Or as Mukherjee sums it up:

“It is one of the cleverest ways of repurposing a cell’s intrinsic molecular apparatus.”

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