Fungi such as Aspergillus are so common in our surroundings that we breathe in hundreds to thousands of spores every day. In healthy people, fungi typically pose no threat, but they can cause deadly infections in those with compromised immune systems. However, it is increasingly recognized that viral infections such as influenza or SARS-CoV-2 can increase the risk of invasive Aspergillus infections even in healthy people.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has stated that invasive fungal infections are an increasing threat to human health and has reiterated that more research is needed. Until now little was known about how the Aspergillus fungus was able to take root, and what could be done to get rid of it. Researchers at the University of Calgary working with researchers at McGill University have provided new insight on why the immune system fails.

“We discovered that influenza and COVID-19 destroy a previously unknown natural immunity that we need to resist invasive fungal infections,” says Nicole Sarden, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Calgary and first author on the study.

New tools are steadily bridging this gap. And ongoing development of one particular technique, cryo-electron tomography, or cryo-ET, has the potential to deepen how researchers study and understand how cells function in health and disease.

As the former editor-in-chief of Science magazine and as a researcher who has studied hard-to-visualize large protein structures for decades, I have witnessed astounding progress in the development of tools that can determine biological structures in detail. Just as it becomes easier to understand how complicated systems work when you know what they look like, understanding how biological structures fit together in a cell is key to understanding how organisms function.