Viruses and other parasites may sync with host’s biological clock or reset it

In 2018, however, the evolutionary parasitologist Sarah Reece at the University of Edinburgh and her colleagues reported an intriguing new detail absent from the centuries of earlier accounts: The timing of this phase of the malaria parasite life cycle seemed to be linked to the circadian rhythms of the host. Reece and other scientists are exploring an idea that is making waves in biology: If the body is on a circadian clock, then invasion of the body — whether by a parasite, virus or bacterium — may be governed by a clock as well, either in the host or in the invader. Yet when they repeated the experiment with mice engineered to lack BMAL1, one of the core clock proteins, the active period’s protective effect disappeared: In cells without a working clock, both times were equally good for the virus.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org