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You can go to linode.com/scishow to learn more and get a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. [♪ INTRO] While COVID-19 is fresher on our minds, influenza has been causing pandemics as recently as 2009. Seasonal flu vaccines help manage the most commonly circulating flu strain in a given year, but they aren’t broadly effective enough to tackle all the possible variants of influenza that could crop up.

And when our immune systems meet variants of flu they’ve never seen, that’s a recipe for the next flu pandemic. Which is why researchers want to apply the technology behind COVID-19 mRNA vaccines towards a new, universal flu vaccine. And in a paper recently published in the journal Science, they outline their successes in reducing severe flu infection in mice and ferrets, as well as the vaccine’s potential to minimize the severity of future flu pandemics.

There are a couple of types of flu viruses that concern humans – A and B. Influenza A and B are responsible for the flu outbreaks that existing seasonal vaccines try to target. Influenza A is the only strain known to cause flu pandemics, and can be broken into subtypes based on two proteins present on the surface of the virus.

There are 18 different H and 11 different N subtypes, and together they can form more than 130 different combinations. One combination you might be familiar with is H1N1, a version of which was responsible for the 2009 pandemic. The prospective vaccine contains genetic information that tells the body to produce a key protein that the flu virus would use to attack cells, also called an antigen.

The presence of this antigen prompts the immune system to produce antibodies that neutralize it. While the technology is the same as the Moderna or Pfizer COVID jabs you may have gotten, this vaccine is unique in that it contains mRNA for the H subtype from all 20 known subtypes of influenza A and B viruses! It also differs from other universal flu vaccine attempts because the antigens the mRNA codes for are unique to each subtype, rather than trying to use mRNA shared between viral subtypes.

The researchers note that this would not be practical with conventional vaccines, but mRNA technology makes it easier to incorporate multiple antigens into the same vaccine. That’s because mRNA vaccine technology is sort of analogous to a 3D printer. In the past you would have had to make all those antigens by hand, but with mRNA, if you know the right genetic code, it’s theoretically plug and play.

When mice and ferrets were vaccinated with the new vaccine and then infected with several different flu strains, they survived infection. By comparison, animals vaccinated with flu vaccines that only target specific strains died after infection with other flu varieties. The animal trials show that the antibodies produced stick around for about four months, which is comparable to current seasonal vaccines.

What’s better is that those antibodies were equally good at neutralizing all 20 subtypes of flu virus, so the recipient receives protection from severe infection for quite some time. And the researchers also found that, after infection with an unfamiliar H surface protein, so one that wasn’t in the vaccine, the amount of virus was similar in vaccinated versus unvaccinated ferrets. However, the severity of the virus was less in vaccinated ferrets; they got less sick and got better faster than the unvaccinated group.

This shows that the vaccine doesn’t necessarily prevent infection, it just makes the infection not so bad as if you were unvaccinated. The researchers note that the original version of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine was able to protect against newer COVID flavors as they cropped up. While vaccinated people may have experienced breakthrough infections, there was overall protection against severe illness.

In the same vein, this prospective vaccine gives its recipients a baseline level of protection from a wide variety of flu strains, which is especially important when the next pandemic-causing strain of virus comes along. The researchers hope to begin human trials soon, increasing hopes that it could raise broad-spectrum defenses against the next flu pandemic. Now this next story also deals with tiny things, just not as tiny as viruses.

Rather, the recent sighting of an extremely rare ciliate has us all kinds of excited, and not just because this critter has only been spotted 6 times in the last 114 years! James Weiss over at our sister channel Journey to the Microcosmos helped spot this microbe, and he and his collaborators have published their findings in the journal Protist. This elusive ciliate, a type of single-celled protozoan, spends its time in low- to no-oxygen freshwater sediments.

Given its small size, a mere 75 to 120 micrometers long, and the environment it lives in, it’s no wonder it has been hard to spot, although not for lack of trying by many talented microscopists. In their paper, the researchers outline the never-before-seen movement of this tiny critter’s tentacles, which resemble finger-like appendages. One of the cells James collected was alive and mobile on the microscope slide, so he was able to observe its movements for five days.

And he could see it extending its tentacles while resting and pulling them in while swimming, something that no one else had ever observed in this creature before. Prior observations have only described the position of its tentacles, which, thanks to this new research, we know can change as the creature extends or contracts them. This ciliate is a shapeshifter; depending on the position of its tentacles, the cell looks completely different!

When the tentacles are fully pulled in, part of the cell folds, causing it to appear heart-shaped. And when the tentacles are fully extended, the fold goes away. This shape-shifting has led to differing descriptions of this creature’s appearance, seeing as the new finding is the first to observe the ciliate both moving and at rest.

In 1967 a decision was made, based solely on descriptions of their appearance, to move one species of this ciliate into a completely new genus. However, the authors of this new research evaluated the genome of their collected ciliate species to determine its place on the phylogenetic tree. Their results suggest that the other species should be moved back under the original genus, due to its similarity with their study species, but more data needs to be collected to confirm this.

We are thrilled to shine a light on the work being done in the world of microscopy and descriptive biology! This is a field where much of the work is done just by careful observation, and Journey to the Microcosmos will bring you up close to where it is happening. So I definitely encourage you to head on over there after this video!

It’s certainly one of my favorite things that I get to be a part of. But first, thank you to Linode for supporting this SciShow News video! By streaming this video, you could be using

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To see all that Linode has to offer, you can click the link in the description or head to linode.com/scishow. That link gives you a $100 60-day credit on a new Linode account. See you next time! [♪ OUTRO]