Clever little dickenses, aren’t they?
Now, Gonzalez and his team have discovered a new form of this microbial mimicry that’s especially macabre. To avoid being snuffed out by the immune system, the bacteria that cause strep throat tear apart red blood cells and then dress themselves in the debris, as reported today in the journal Cell Reports.
When this strategy works, the bacteria, called Group A Streptococcus (group A strep), remain concealed while they wreak havoc on the body, the study’s mouse experiments show. But when a protein in the bacteria responsible for the sanguine disguise is snipped out of the strep genome, the microbes are left exposed, allowing the immune system to attack the pathogens and prevent a potentially deadly infection.
Katherine J. Wu, “Harmful Bacteria Masquerade as Red Blood Cells to Evade the Immune System” at Nature
If you need the job and your Darwinist bosses are still clinging to life and patrolling, for the sake of your career, keep telling yourself, there is no intelligence behind nature!
The deception is an unusual tactic, but an effective one, says co-first author Anaamika Campeau, a biochemist in Gonzalez’s lab. To hide any features that might incriminate group A strep as foreign invaders, the microbes plaster themselves with pieces of cells the immune system sees all the time and knows not to attack, she explains. “Once we kind of came to that idea, it all sort of fell into place.”
Katherine J. Wu, “Harmful Bacteria Masquerade as Red Blood Cells to Evade the Immune System” at Nature
Indeed, Madam Professor! You follow brilliantly in the footsteps of Miss Marple. We need intelligence to uncover this because intelligence underlies it:
See also: Blood feeding evolved independently about 100 times despite being a very complex trait: But still we hear, “There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.” Darwin, “Life and Letters,” i, p. 278 ? Hadn’t the Darwinists better change their story a bit?
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