Imagine that you are a bad guy running from the law, and the sheriff is about to catch up to you. If you want, you can be Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid or any other charismatic bad guy. Or maybe you’re a wizard in Harry Potter and Dementors are about to catch up to you.

But then, just as the sheriff, or the Dementor, or whatever, catches up, you wave a magic wand and instead of killing or capturing you, your nemesis transforms into a big tent inside of which you can hide. And the tent is made out of food that you can eat.

This, metaphorically (and thus not exactly accurate, but close enough) is what Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) does. This strategy, only now just discovered, is the explanation for the mystery of tuberculosis infection: TB is capable of hiding, while in remission, in a patient’s body indefinitely. It is now believed, according to a study release five minutes ago in the journal PLoS Pathogens, that Mtb cells utilize a piece of their own cell surface to induce killer immune cells — macrophages — to convert into foamy fat storing cells, inside of which the Mtb hides and, according to this research, remain alive.

There are a lot of details still to work out, and this research has only been done so far in vitro (which, by the way, is one of the advantages of this specific research … see paper for details), but this research constitutes a major step forward.

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