(From left to right). Ernesto Segredo, Rafael Sanjuán and Pilar Domingo.

Pilar Domingo, Ernesto Segredo, María Durán and Rafael Sanjuán, from the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I²SysBio), a joint center of the University of Valencia and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), have shown that viruses behave altruistically to avoid the immune system. This research, published this Monday in Nature Microbiology and carried out on the vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV), has potential applications in the development of antiviral treatments and vaccines.

The study has focused on what mechanisms viruses use to evade interferon activity, that is, the innate immune response that higher organisms have to generally block viral infections by interfering with their replication. The research group has used the vesicular stomatitis virus to propose a model of social evolution that allows studying how natural selection acts to obtain virus variants that are capable of blocking interferon.

The research has shown that viruses have evolved various mechanisms to avoid this activity while modifying the adaptation of other members of the viral population. Therefore, interactions between viruses are of utmost importance for the evolution of viral variants, and these clearly constitute a social process.

The results of the research, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, show that viruses interact socially with each other and that, in addition, the ecological and social principles that apply to other more complex organisms can also be applied to viruses. The work signed first by Pilar Domingo, a researcher at I²SysBio, has analyzed the internal interactions of the vesicular stomatitis virus in mice, cell culture and computational modeling with simulations of complex systems using mathematical models.

According to the spokesperson for the research group, although the analysis of interactions between viruses and host organisms is a common practice used to control diseases or develop preventive measures, virus-virus interactions are still unknown. “In this work we demonstrate the altruistic capacity of viruses, in which certain escape routes from the immune system can be selected although they may have a cost for the viruses that encode this character,” declared Pilar Domingo.

The research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and by the Juan de la Cierva Incorporación program, of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.

Biological systems complex

The Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I²SysBio) is dedicated to the study of complex biological systems, especially microorganisms, with applications mainly in biomedicine and biotechnology. The center works through an innovative public-private research model and is located in the Science Park of the University of Valencia, on the Burjassot-Paterna campus.

Article:

Pilar Domingo-Calap, Ernesto Segredo-Otero, María Durán-Moreno and Rafael Sanjuán: «Social evolution of innate immunity evasion in a virus». Nature Microbiology (2019). DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-019-0379-8