viruses
sporte | November 7, 2008Over 55,000 people die each year from rabies, a disease that is 100% preventable, according to Dr. Guy Palmer, who spoke last night at the University of Washington.
Dr. Palmer is from the School for Global Animal Health, a group that works towards improving global health through advancing preventative care for both humans and animals. One of the preventative measures is through rabies vaccination.
Image from the CDC Public Library of Health.
Rabies cases can be prevented by vaccinating dogs and other animals that carry the virus like raccoons, skunks, and foxes. The virus itself has a…
edyong | October 18, 2008
A virus, like any other carrier of genetic information, can only enjoy evolutionary success by ensuring that its genetic material is passed on through the ages, and it can only do that if its offspring finds new hosts to infect. Its host must live to infect again, and the virus that kills its host prematurely signs its own evolutionary death sentence.
So over time, we might expect that the ideal virus would evolve to never kill any of its hosts - it would have zero 'virulence'. It would also evolve to successfully infect every host it comes into contact with it - it would have a hundred…
mikethemadbiologist | October 13, 2008I've said this many times before, but it's worth repeating again: whether it's an influenza pandemic, or 'just' annual influenza (which, in the U.S., kills double the number of people as HIV/AIDS), what actually does the killing is the secondary bacterial infection, not the virus.
A recent review describes the result of a large series of autoposies of victims from the 1918 pandemic (as well as later pandemics). The main finding (italics mine):
Their findings are striking in the context of modern conceptions of the 1918 pandemic; the great majority of deaths could be attributed to secondary…
sporte | September 30, 2008HealthMap is a great site that could be an excellent resource when teaching a biology, microbiology, or health class. Not to mention, I can picture people using it before they travel somewhere or even just for fun.
I learned about HealthMap awhile ago from Mike the Mad Biologist, but I didn't get time to play with the site until today.
Here's an example to see how it works.
How do I use HealthMap?
I begin using HealthMap by changing the number of diseases selected to "none."
Then I scrolled through the list until I found something interesting. I chose "Poisoning." The number of…
sporte | September 27, 2008One of the holy grails of modern medicine is the development of a vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDs. An obstacle to attaining this goal has been the difficulty in stimulating the immune system to make it produce the right kinds of antibodies. A recent finding in Science describes a gene that controls production of these antibodies and may provide insights to the development of an effective vaccine. (1).
Antibodies are special kinds of proteins that bind to things, often very tightly. If they bind to the right molecules, they can prevent viruses from infecting cells and target…
sporte | September 26, 2008Let's play anomaly!
Most of this week, I've written about the fun time I had playing around with NCBI's Blink database and finding evidence that at least one mosquito, Aedes aegypti, seems to have been infected at some point with a plant paramyxovirus and that the paramyxovirus left one of its genes behind, stuck in the mosquito genome.
During this process, I realized that the method I used works with other viruses, too. I tried it with a few random viruses and sure enough, I found some interesting things.
You've got a week to give it a try. Let's see what you find! The method is…
sporte | September 25, 2008Do mosquitoes get the mumps? Part V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank
This is the last in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes and a general method for finding other interesting things.
In this last part, I discuss a general method for finding novel things in GenBank and how this kind of project could be a good sort of discovery, inquiry-based project for biology, microbiology, or bioinformatics students.
I. The back story from the genome record
II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
III.…
sporte | September 24, 2008Part IV. Assembling the details and making the case for a novel paramyxovirus
This is the fourth in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in a mosquito. In this part, we take a look at all the evidence we can find and try to figure out how a gene from a virus came to be part of the Aedes aegypti genome.
image from the Public Health Library
I. The back story from the genome record
II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink.
IV. Assembling the details of the case for a novel mosquito paramyxovirus
V. A…
sporte | September 23, 2008Part III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink
In which we find an unexpected result when we Blink while looking at the mumps polymerase.
This is the third in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes. And yes, this is where the discovery happens.
I. The back story from the genome record
II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink.
IV. Assembling the details of the case for a mosquito paramyxovirus
V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank
To paraphrase Louis Pasteur,…
sporte | September 22, 2008Part II. What do mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
This is the second in a five part series on an unexpected discovery of a paramyxovirus in mosquitoes, and a general method for finding interesting things.
I. The back story from the genome record
II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink.
IV. Assembling the details of the case for a mosquito paramyxovirus
V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank
In Part I, we looked at the NCBI SeqViewer, and found a new way to check out a genome map, and learn more…
sporte | September 21, 2008Part I. The back story from the genome record
Together, these five posts describe the discovery of a novel paramyxovirus in the Aedes aegyptii genome and a new method for finding interesting anomalies in GenBank.
I. The back story from the genome record
II. What do the mumps proteins do? And how do we find out?
III. Serendipity strikes when we Blink.
IV. Assembling the details of the case for a mosquito paramyxovirus
V. A general method for finding interesting things in GenBank
I began this series on mumps intending to write about immunology and how vaccines work to stimulate the immune…
mikethemadbiologist | September 2, 2008A recent, must-read article for anyone concerned about the problem of misuse of antibiotics to treat viral bronchitis, not to mention anyone who prescribes antibiotics, was recently published in Clinical Infectious Diseases. The short version: giving patients antibiotics to treat viral pneumonia is dangerous for the patients themselves (never mind the evolutionary consequences of increasing resistance).
Since antibiotics are almost never effective against bronchitis, the prescribing rate should be nearly zero, but in the U.S., 67% of adults with acute bronchitis received antibiotic therapy…
sporte | August 28, 2008Mumps was a common childhood disease when I was a child. We grew up learning that it was better to get mumps as a child because getting it as an adult would make you sterile. No doubt that idea arose from symptoms like swollen glands, swollen testicles, etc. When I looked in PubMed though, I couldn't find much data on sterility (at least not easily).
I did find data on hearing loss.
Death is not a common outcome of mumps. Between 1953 and 1962, there were 162,344 cases of mumps in the U.S. every year and only 39 deaths per year. People, mostly children, did die from mumps, but other…
sporte | August 27, 2008It's déjà vu all over again.
The first chapter in Arthur Allen's book "Vaccine" describes the history of smallpox vaccination in the United States. In 1721, in Boston, the prevailing belief was that to get vaccinated was to intervene with "divine providence." If you tried to protect yourself, it meant that you lacked faith in God.
Today, I read that a mumps outbreak is happening in Vancouver, Canada. So far 116 cases have been confirmed.
Why is mumps, a preventable and serious disease, causing problems in Canada?
photo of a child with mumps by by Barbara Rice, from the Public…
edyong | August 17, 2008They say that memory declines as age marches on, but that only applies to neurons - the immune system has a very different sort of memory and it stays fresh till the end of life. To this day, people who survived the 1918 flu pandemic carry antibodies that can remember and neutralise the murderous strain.
The 1918 influenza virus was the most devastating infections of recent history and killed anywhere from 20 to 100 million people in the space of two years. Ironically, it seems that the virus killed via the immune system of those infected. It caused immune cells to unleash a torrent of…
sporte | August 15, 2008Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system to respond to a specific thing. Most of the vaccines we use are designed to prime the immune system so that it's ready to fight off some kind of disease, like whooping cough, polio, or influenza. Some vaccines can have more specialized functions, like stimulating the body to attack cancer cells, kill rogue autoimmune cells, or prevent pregnancy. We'll look at what they do in later posts, for now, let's look at the kinds of things that can be used as vaccines.
It's an amazing assortment. Even more amazing is that these items don't all work in…
mikethemadbiologist | August 8, 2008Welcome to the world of virophage--viruses that parasitize other viruses. What's interesting is that the 'host' viruses are the megaviruses which are visible with light microscopy and which have genomes that can be larger than some bacteria. From Science:
While examining a new giant amoeba virus in a cooling tower in Paris, the researchers found that the virus itself hosted tiny viral particles. They dubbed the virus's virus Sputnik and called it a "virophage" to parallel "bacteriophage," which is the name for a virus that infects bacteria. Unlike most viruses, Sputnik does not replicate by…
edyong | August 6, 2008Viruses may cause disease but some can fall ill themselves. For the first time, a group of scientists have discovered a virus that targets other viruses. This new virus-of-viruses was discovered by Bernard La Scola and Christelle Desnues at the University of the Mediterranean, who have playfully named it Sputnik, after the Russian for "fellow traveller". It is so unique that they have classified it in an entirely new family - the "virophages" - in honour of the similarities it shares with the bacteriophage viruses that use bacteria as hosts.
The story of Sputnik started in 1992 with some…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2008tags: virology, mimivirus, sputnik, virophage, microbiology, molecular biology
Now here's an astonishing discovery that's hot off the presses: a virus that infects other viruses! This amazing finding is being published tomorrow in the top-tier peer-reviewed journal, Nature.
I don't know about you, but when I was in school, I was taught that viruses could only infect other living cells, and further, I was taught that viruses are not living cells. So, logically, one could conclude that viruses cannot infect other viruses. But a new discovery by a group of scientists in France reveals otherwise…