The Laptev Virus

Sarah hesitated briefly while she gathered her thoughts. Her idea was a bit far-fetched and she was suddenly abashed to describe it in front of her visitors. She took a deep breath and reminded herself of the reasons why her hypothesis seemed like a good one. “Well, I could be totally in left field, but this is what I’m thinking: what if, for some reason, the mice in C12 were already resistant?”

“They can’t be resistant to Laptev if they’ve never seen the virus and have not been inoculated beforehand,” said Emile. “And Laptev is a megavirus, which means that it belongs to a group of viruses that is exceedingly rare and found only in remote locations around the planet. So it’s impossible that the mice could be resistant. Maybe some of them could have had some natural immunity to viruses in general, or maybe they had some sort of interferon thing going, but it’s unlikely that the whole group from C12 would be resistant, while none of the C8 ones were.”

“Interferon?” asked Angela.

“It’s a compound that host cells release when they are being attacked by a pathogen like a virus. It lets its neighboring cells know that there is danger around so that they can increase their defenses.”

“Some call it a ‘Paul Revere’ molecule,” said Shane. “The viruses are coming, the viruses are coming!”

“No they don’t. I’ve never heard that,” said Emile, rolling his eyes. “Anyway, Sarah, like I said, there’s no way that the mice can be resistant.”

Sarah looked at him enigmatically, raising one eyebrow.

“Sarah, it’s not magic,” said Emile, with a note of impatience creeping into his voice. “If the mice have never seen the virus, which they shouldn’t have since it was locked in the ice for 30,000 years, there’s no way they would have been able to create antibodies against it. We also know there are no similar viruses that infect mammals nowadays, so there’s no chance of cross-immunity. There’s simply no way for the mice to have developed an immune response before they were exposed.”

“I agree,” said Sarah hesitantly, “and we can run a couple of ELISA tests to see if the infected mice that lived have anti-Laptev antibodies.”

The enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, often called by its acronym, ELISA, was a great diagnostic tool that was often used in a microbiology laboratory as it employed antibodies, which were like precise keys, to identify certain substances. The substances thus marked would glow in the dark and could be captured in a photograph.

“Actually,” said Tally, “I ran an ELISA.”

“You did?” said Sarah and Emile in unison.

Tally nodded. “And it gave me an idiosyncratic answer. Look.”

Sarah leaned in and watched as Tally clicked on the progressively magnified images. Her eyes widened with barely concealed delight as she watched. She had seen viruses being attacked by host defense systems many times, but she had never seen anything like this. The magnified ELISA images showed a single megavirus that was perfectly surrounded by a lustrous ring, as if the virus had donned a snug, luminous coat. The light was due to the huge antibody complexes that were attacking it. The antibodies had been labeled with fluorescent markers and she could just imagine them clustering furiously around the antigen.

When she thought of these complexes she was always reminded of Koi ponds she had seen as a little girl, which teemed with brightly colored yellow, orange and white fish. As the fish swam, their long, diaphanous fins billowed out, their tails trailing gracefully in the water. But when she threw a few pellets of food into the pond, the fish had become a writhing mass, pouncing on the pellets as if they were starving.

“I don’t get it,” said Angela. “What exactly are we looking at here? I see a dark elongated blob surrounded by something that shines, but I can’t tell what any of it means.”

“Those glowing parts you see there,” said Sarah, leaning in toward the monitor and using her pen as a pointer. “Those are antibodies, thousands of miniscule immunoglobulins, each labeled with a tiny fluorescent protein. They are the mouse defense system, so they float around in the blood, watching out for any trouble. They seem to have found it so they are attaching to the foreign particle that is threatening the mouse. In this case, their enemy is the Laptev virus,” she said, moving the pen to trace a large ovoid shape, the virus, at the center of a gleaming halo.

“But I can’t really distinguish anything. It’s all just a spiky glowing mass around the virus,” answered Angela.