Biosecurity

U.S. military is interested in bats as possible defenders against bioweapons

Today, the U.S. military is again interested in bats not as front-line attackers but as defenders against a potentially devastating threat: Russian bioweapons.

Fruit bats have an almost supernatural ability to harbor some of the planet's most deadly viruses without getting sick themselves. Inject an Egyptian fruit bat with the Marburg virus - a hemorrhagic relative of the infamous Ebola virus - and nothing happens. Do the same thing to a human, and within a week, the patient could be bleeding to death.

These bats' extraordinary super-immunity has long fascinated virologists, and new research has shed light on how these flying frugivores achieve their supreme skill. Unpacking the mystery involved some cunning detective work from a coalition of scientists at Boston University and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Their work was published in the journal Cell.

"What we are trying to do is to study bat immunology, but that turned out to be a very difficult thing to do when starting from scratch," said Thomas Kepler, a professor of microbiology at Boston University. It took decades to create the reactive substances necessary to study human or mouse antibodies. With bats, he explained, they were starting from zero.