How Does Influenza Take Control of Human Cells?…

How Does Influenza Take Control of Human Cells? Researchers Uncover a Hidden Strategy Influenza viruses don't simply infect human cells, they reprogram them. Within hours of entering a cell, the virus redirects the cell's own machinery to manufacture new viral particles while evading parts of the immune response. Exactly how this happens has remained incompletely understood. Now, researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) have created one of the most detailed molecular maps yet of influenza A infection, revealing previously unknown ways the virus exploits human cells. The findings were published in Nature Microbiology. Most previous studies examined infected cells after breaking them open, making it difficult to determine which protein interactions actually occurred during infection. In this study, researchers used cross-linking mass spectrometry (XL-MS) together with AlphaFold-assisted structural modeling to capture protein interactions inside intact infected ce