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Among the various viruses that sicken your gut, some at least leave behind a tiny path of cellular destruction as they replicate, implicating the guilty pathogen. Both rotavirus and norovirus invade the small intestine, multiply there and can break through the organ's outer lining as one way of proliferating in the body.

Astroviruses, which infect the same organ and cause pediatric diarrhea worldwide, have a slicker strategy that avoids tissue damage. In a recent study published in the PLOS Pathogens, a team of cell biologists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, reports the astrovirus's exit strategy. In a few words, it can be summed up as "follow the mucus."

The team discovered that astrovirus relies on mucus secretion from goblet cells as the coordinated path to completing its replication cycle. The finding reveals potentially new targets for strategies to treat pediatric diarrhea, according to the paper's senior author, Valerie Cortez, a professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz.

"Together, these findings highlight a new facet of enteric virus-host biology that allows for the efficient release of virus particles," Cortez said. "Prior to our study, the pathway by which astroviruses exit the cell was largely unknown, unlike for other major enteric viruses like norovirus and rotavirus."

The study builds on the Cortez Lab's previous discovery that astrovirus targets the intestine's goblet cells.

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