14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out by Esther Schnettler, for her doctorate at Wageningen University, Wageningen UR, suggests that besides antibodies and interferons, humans also might have an immune system that looks very much like that of plants.
She worked with Professor Ben Berkhout's group, of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, and she discovered that a protein used by plant viruses to overcome plant resistance can also weaken the defense against HIV viruses in people.
Plants have a specific mechanism of protecting themselves against viruses: they attack, deactivate and break down genetic material, in the RNA silencing process, and as a response, viruses try to bypass the system by producing proteins that block it.
For her research, Schnettler analyzed the functioning of these silencing suppressor proteins in plants, admitting that if science manages to improve the defenses of plants, then there would be far less pesticide use against insets and other pathogens.
Schnettler extended the research and tried to find out if the silencing suppressor proteins that affect plants and allow viruses to infect them, could eventually have an effect on the human immune system.
Besides antibodies, which detect the protein shells of viruses and destroy them, the human immune system has another way of fighting viruses: it releases interferons that give a sign to cells to die, thus preventing the viruses within those cells from multiplying or spreading.
Schnettler's collaboration with the researchers from AMC has proven very successful, once they discovered that HIV mutants, unable to produce a certain protein and multiply, can start reproducing up to wild type virus titer levels when a silencing suppressor protein from a plant virus was added.
This experiment implies that humans too, have the defense against viruses that plants use against intruders, and that it also detects and deactivates the genetic material of the HIV virus.
“The research has helped us to understand that the process of RNA silencing seems to be a widely occurring antiviral defense,” explained Schnettler.
“Our findings could offer new opportunities for developing antiviral medication.
“This is not yet certain, however, as the RNA silencing process in the human body has (additional) other functions that must not be impaired by medicines,” she added.
These results might be a gate toward new opportunities for improving health, and the entire research will be presented today along with Schnettler’s doctoral thesis, at Wageningen University.