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The researchers now plan to apply the new knowledge to help develop better immunotherapeutics.
A study led by Boston University has found deep-sea bacteria so foreign to the human immune system that immune cells do not record it.
This discovery gave researchers a deeper understanding of how immune systems work, in particular, testing the classical concept of “universal immunity”, the idea that the immune system evolved. the human to be able to sense all the microbes.
“The idea was that the immune system is universal, it doesn’t matter if something was a threat or not, he got rid of it. But no one had weighed in on the assumption. so far, “said Jonathan Kagan, of Boston Children ‘s Hospital immunologist and one of the study’ s leaders, told Living Science.
The researchers excavated the new species of microbial organisms 4,000 meters below the surface in one of the largest and deepest marine protected areas in the world, located in the Phoenix Islands Protected Area of Kiribati in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Using a remote-controlled submarine, the researchers collected marine bacteria from various specimens and then evolved them into more than a hundred cultured species. After injecting 50 of the rays into mouse and human immune cells, scientists found that 80% of microbes were left unidentified.
“What you end up with is a picture of the immune system as being defined locally by the lice it lives near, and that the lice and their immunity have improved. If you your immune system to a different ecosystem, a lot of the lice there will be silent, “Kagan said.
The researchers found that the immune cells were blinded to lipopolysaccharide – or LPS – a specific part of the bacterial cell wall.
Kagan explained that the lipid chains on the LPS were much longer than those found in the onshore bacteria.
“… But we still don’t know why that means they can go unrecognized,” Kagan said.
Randi Rotjan, co-author of a study and marine ecologist at Boston University assured Live Science that the bacteria that cleared the human immune system pose no risk to humans from becoming infected, saying “if any pathogenity otherwise it would be inadvertent ”, since the bacteria did not grow to evade mammalian immune systems. Rotjan also said that environments inside a human body are very different from those at the bottom of the ocean.
“These bacteria are unhappy for more than a few minutes outside of their normal range,” said the researcher.