The Infection Heist: How Social Viruses Team Up for the Perfect Score
If you’ve seen any heist movie, you know it takes a team to get the job done. The safe-cracker, the inside man, the getaway driver. Each member plays a key role, without which the group’s success is jeopardized.
Viruses in a competitive environment work in a similar way. A perspective paper published in mSystems suggests that interactions between viruses are more complicated than virologists originally thought. Using social evolution theory, Samuel Díaz-Muñoz, assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, hopes to help fight viral and bacterial infections with new treatments that harness interactions between viruses.
Díaz-Muñoz sees understanding the social interactions of viruses as a key to help limit viral outbreaks. With fellow researchers Rafael Sanjuán of the University of Valencia and Stuart West of Oxford University, he has coined the term “sociovirology” which aims to develop evolutionary models to help predict virus-virus interactions. Similar models have been developed for bacteria, cancer and many other levels of biology.