Partial Clean-up

Like a cleaner who responds to a complaint of a spill by sweeping it under the rug, the brain’s immune cells seem to deliver an incomplete solution to some fungal infections. Researchers looked at how mouse microglia, the brain’s resident immune cells, responded to infection by Cryptococcus neoformans, a fungus that can cause fatal meningitis. They saw the immune cells detect the fungus in blood vessels before it breaches the protective blood-brain barrier. Crumbs shed from the fungus capsule are taken up by cells lining the blood vessels, which raise the alarm and call for help. Microglia (green) wrap around the vessels (pink) and engulf the fungi (red), but fail to fully kill them, and may even provide a nutrient-rich environment for the fungus to further thrive. Understanding, and ultimately manipulating, this interaction could lead to future strategies to treat or prevent fungal brain infections.

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.

Website

• Image from work by Chenxu Feng, Ge Wang and Yixuan Wang, and colleagues
• Sheng Yushou Center of Cell Biology and Immunology, School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, February 2026