HIV's Way In

Lymph nodes (like the one pictured) are jam-packed full of immune cells and thus paradise for HIV – a virus that attacks and destroys such cells. And what’s worse, certain cells in lymph nodes called follicular dendritic cells act as reservoirs for the virus maintaining its infectivity and making the infection hard to treat. Now researchers have discovered in mice how HIV gets into these cells. They found that macrophage cells (cyan) lining the draining vessels act as transport shuttles for HIV particles (green speckles), carrying them to the underlying dendritic cells (blue). What’s more, they’ve identified a protein in the macrophages that's pivotal to this virus-shuttling process. Indeed, absence of the protein dramatically reduced the spread of HIV into the dendritic cells. By understanding how HIV is recruited to and harboured within these cells scientists have the chance to design new treatments that can limit HIV’s deadly occupation.

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 by John Kehrl and Chung Park
• B-cell Molecular Immunology Section, Laboratory of Immunoregulation, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Research published in eLife, December 2019