Lighting Infections

When attracting mates and deterring predators, fireflies emit a light created by an enzyme called luciferase. Playing on this natural occurrence, scientists mixed the fluorescent enzyme with the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), to track where SIV infects cells within the reproductive tract of female macaque monkeys. Contrary to previous beliefs that the virus is passed to women within the cells of the cervix, they found that SIV infects cells from the labia all the way through to the ovaries, targeting a population of T cells that play an important role in the immune response (T cells stained with green fluorescence and SIV protein with red). As the HIV infection of humans is very similar, this research could lead to the development of more specific prevention methods for women, targeting the virus at its earliest stages.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image from work by Daniel Stieh and colleagues
• Feinberg School of Medicine, North Western University, Chicago, IL, USA
• Image copyright Elsevier 2016
• Published in Cell Host & Microbe, April 2016