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Influenza virus, shown here coloured red inside lung cells, infects these and other epithelial cells of the respiratory tract to create all the unpleasant symptoms we associate with a bout of flu. Recently, scientists who were investigating how the virus is replicated and mobilised within these cells made a surprising discovery. They inhibited the activity of a particular vesicle [a membrane-coated organelle for moving molecules in and out of cells] trafficking protein, called Rab11B, to see the effect on viral protein transport and found that one of the viral strains they were studying (H3N2) was blocked from entering the cells altogether. The other (H1N1) was not. Until these experiments, it had been presumed that H3N2 and H1N1 entered cells by the same mechanism. While the precise role of Rab11B in H3N2 cellular entry remains to be determined, the findings could lead to new ways for preventing and curtailing infections with that particular strain.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Allyson H. Turner & Sara A. Jaffrani, and colleagues, Bruce Lab
• Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA
• Image originally published with no restrictions – hence published here with as Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in Journal of Virology, June 2026