Bubble Backup

When one player is sent off in a football match, teammates can step up to compensate and keep the game alive. Researchers have found similar resilience in the way Cryptosporidium parasites survive in the human gut, where they cause the diarrhoeal disease cryptosporidiosis. The parasites survive inside a protective bubble within gut cells, called the parasitophorous vacuole. To understand how this structure forms, researchers investigated the protein CP2, and found it's secreted during invasion and becomes part of the forming vacuole. However, parasites lacking CP2 can still survive, possibly by increasing production of another protein, SG3 (pictured in green vacuoles around red parasites 36 hours after infection of human gut cells). Together these proteins help shape and maintain the vacuole that protects the parasite and mediates interaction with the host cell. Understanding this built-in redundancy may help guide efforts to develop more effective treatments.

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 Fuxian Yang and colleagues
• State Key Laboratory of Animal Disease Control and Prevention, Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Diseases, College of Veterinary Medicine, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Pathogens, December 2025