Silent Treatment

Sometimes it’s sufficient to disarm an enemy, leaving them alive but impotent. That’s the approach of a new anti-fungal peptide, EntV, which has been shown to block a common infectious fungus’ virulence and formation of dangerous biofilms in animals. To understand how it works, a new study examined a fragment of EntV, tracking how it interacts with fungal cells in worms and mice. EntV binds to the fungal cell surface (pictured, pink on fungal filaments) and reduces the release of extracellular vesicles (packets of material released by fungi to communicate and cause disease) sixfold, disrupting how the fungus communicates and delivers its harmful factors without inhibiting actual fungal growth, meaning it acts as an anti-virulence weapon rather than a conventional antifungal. This approach could open the door to reducing the harmful impact rather than killing cells, limiting the risk of resistance arising and avoiding collateral damage to other healthy microbes.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Giuseppe Buda De Cesare and colleagues
• Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Texas McGovern Medical School, Houston, TX, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Pathogens, September 2025