Bats are the only mammals that can fly (although some can slip). They have excellent hearing, are navigated by echolocation, and can eat weight with insects overnight. But the most impressive superpower of bats is their incredible resistance to viral infections.
Bats host many viruses, viruses that can get sick and even kill other mammals. And explains that the superpower may be related to its ability to fly. CarbrookProfessor at the University of Chicago, studying the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans, particularly infectious diseases that come from wild bats.
Longer lifespans provide better virus protection
Flying is metabolically expensive. Brooke said bats in flight increase their basal metabolic rate 15 times compared to their stationary speed. Organisms with high metabolic rates tend to have smaller bodies and very short-lived. This is probably because organisms with high metabolic rates accumulate oxidative stress in their cells, degrading tissues and organs more quickly, shortening their lifespan.
However, bats have an unusually long lifespan due to their size. Brooke and other scientists studying bats believe that bats evolve and increase their lifespan, which mitigate oxidative damage caused by increased metabolism. So, what does this have to do with the virus?
read more: Evidence of the origin of Covid-19 outbreak challenges lab leakage theory
Bat Immune System
Brook’s theory is that many of these molecular pathways have made bats more tolerant of the virus, in addition to extending bat lifespans. But what do you think? According to Brook, the answer is that damage to cells infected with the virus resembles cells caused by metabolic activity, and bats evolved to attenuate their response. The immune response to the virus is extremely inflammatory.
“What we experience as a disease is actually immunopathology,” explains Brook. For example, if you have a fever from the flu, it is the immune system’s response to the influenza virus. But bats do not develop these intense immune responses against the virus they carry. “I think it’s really a by-product of their adaptation to their flight,” says Brook.
It’s very cool, but it can also be very useful. If researchers can understand how bats handle these infectious diseases without getting sick, they may learn how to make humans more resilient to infections. We and a team of Canadian researchers led by us Michael Letko We have developed a new set of tools that will help researchers do just that.
Growing bats
Letko is a molecular virologist at Washington State University. He and his team recently cultivated two new bat cells that can be grown and split in the lab indefinitely. The work was explained in a paper Published in PLOS Biology. These cell lines help us learn how viruses and bats exist that can kill a large number of humans. Of course, this is very important when the next pandemic occurs, but the utility of these cells goes beyond that.
“Virus often cause all sorts of pathology,” says Letko. “If we can understand how to control these pathologies, we can apply them to not only infectious diseases but many other scenarios.”
Some private labs have already cultured these cell lines, but they are not available to external researchers. However, jobs funded by the US government must be freely shared. Letko’s research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was a collaborative effort by US and Canadian scientists.
Letko and colleagues arranged for these cell lines to be available to researchers who need them for their work.
“We have a lot of experts who can say something about what’s going on if these animals are likely to have the ability to study it, but that’s not,” he says. “So I hope that by putting this resource there, people from a wide range of backgrounds can really get into this.”
Humans did not develop the ability to fly. However, we have developed the ability to study flying animals. And it turns out to be an even more useful skill.
read more: Why Bats are breeding grounds for deadly diseases like Ebola and monkeys
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Avery Hart is a freelance science journalist. In addition to writing for Discover, she regularly writes about various outlets, both printed and online, including National Geographic, Science News Explores, Medscape, and WebMD. She is the author of Bullet who has your name. What You Probably Die, and What You Can Do About It, Clerisy Press 2007, and some books for younger readers. While attending university, Avery started out in journalism, writing for the school’s newspapers and editing student non-fiction magazines. Although she writes about all fields of science, she is particularly interested in AI-interests that developed while earning degrees in neuroscience, science of consciousness, and philosophy.
