Lovely Mastodon peeps! Do I know any virologists here?
(Or are there any who don’t know me yet, but would be up for chatting briefly? It’s background for a project, and I would be really grateful, and of course credit you.)
'Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a new vaccine that offers broad protection against not only SARS-CoV-2 variants, but also other bat sarbecoviruses. The groundbreaking trivalent vaccine has shown complete protection with no trace of virus in the lungs, marking a significant step toward a universal vaccine for coronaviruses.'
Some wasps are called 'parasitoids' because they lay their eggs in still-living caterpillars. The eggs develop into larvae that eat the caterpillar from the inside.
But turnabout is fair play. Sometimes, other wasps called 'hyperparasitoids' lay their eggs in the larvae of these parasitoids!
The caterpillars also fight back. Their immune system detects the wasp's eggs, and they will do things like surround the eggs in a layer of tissue that chokes them.
But many parasitoid wasps have a trick to stop this. They deploy viruses that infect the caterpillar and affect its behavior in various ways - for example, slowing its immune response to the implanted eggs.
These viruses can become so deeply symbiotic with the wasps that their genetic code becomes part of the wasp's DNA. So every wasp comes born with the ability to produce these viruses. They're called 'polydnaviruses'.
In fact some wasps are symbiotic with two kinds of virus. One kind, on its own, would quickly kill the caterpillar - not good for the wasp. The other kind keeps the first kind under control.
And I'm immensely simplifying things here. There are over 25,000 species of parasitoid wasps, so there's a huge variety of things that happen, which scientists are just starting to understand! I had fun reading this:
Why such diversity? I think it's just that there are so many plants! So insect larvae like caterpillars naturally tend to feed on them... in turn providing a big food source for parasitoids, and so on.
@johncarlosbaez Thanks for the reference. Parasitic wasps are crazy biology.
In the case cited below, when the parasitic wasp injects its eggs into a host (for example, a caterpillar), it also injects polydnavirus (PDV) particles. These PDV virions are, remarkably, coded for by the wasp's genome.
The virus then causes the host to express viral gene products that alter the immune defenses, growth and development of the host to optimize conditions for development of the wasp’s offspring.
Physician & Microbiologist Albert Sabin died #OTD in 1993.
With the menace of polio growing, Sabin & other researchers sought a vaccine to prevent or mitigate the illness. This was complicated because there were multiple strains of the disease. Salk developed an inactivated poliovirus vaccine, a "dead" vaccine given by injection. Sabin developed an oral vaccine based on mutant strains of polio virus that seemed to stimulate antibody production but not to cause paralysis.
A bad outbreak of #dengue in Brazil - and a warning that climate change is shifting the vector's range.
"The World Health Organization has warned that dengue is rapidly becoming an urgent global health problem, with a record number of cases last year and outbreaks in places, such as France, that have historically never reported the disease." #Virology#InfectiousDisease#climatechange
[...] "Strains of these Methuselah microbes – or zombie viruses as they are also known – have already been isolated by researchers who have raised fears that a new global medical emergency could be triggered – not by an illness new to science but by a disease from the distant past." | #environment#climate#ClimateChange#virology#epidemiology#arctic#health#PublicHealth
Prof. Vincent Racaniello of #TWiV (This Week in Virology) has started his 2024 series of virology lectures for Biology 4310 at Columbia University. If you would like to learn a little bit about #virology, subscribe to the playlist. Caution: you might become addicted to #TWiV! https://youtu.be/GEC36qO3dBU?si=nCfSCLkMu_IgPsUC
Biologist Arijit Chakravarty
If you read one thread today, make it this one. When a full professor of virology with an h-index of 32 lets their snark slip the leash on media narratives about Covid #MedSpout #Virology #InfectiousDisease
In this 2015 episode of #RadioLab Robert and Jad speak to Carl Zimmer about the traditional lines between life and non-life, introducing viruses the size of cellular microbes. #Virus#Virology#MegaVirus#MimiVirus
Dear #Mastodon
I have a problem and need your help !!
I have a PhD in molecular biology, and while I am NOT an expert in any thing close to Covid, I do know enough that when I read a scientific paper, I can have a sense if it is BS or something so preliminary that 99% of tooters can ignore it
So, when someone toots about one of these papers, what is the best way to respond ?
In most cases, the virus's #genetic material, #DNA is enclosed within a protective protein shell called a #capsid . A research group at Lund University is working to understand the process by which the #virus ejects its genetic material from the capsid and into cells and what causes the virus's DNA to be released. #Biology#Virology#sflorg https://www.sflorg.com/2023/11/bio11082302.html
I’ve re-read this rabies paper twice, but haven’t read follow-ups yet. It may be one of the most fascinating virology papers I’ve read just for the section on cerebral lateralization.
In short, being left-handed reduced how well the body produced neutralizing antibodies after vaccination.
Which…(brain exploding).
Anyhow, seriously interesting nuances in age, sex biology, immune subversion, all kinds of interesting stuff here.