Tag: Immunology

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Public Health by Dr Alex Stockdale

In mid-2021 The Sciku Project teamed up with the Literature and Science Hub at the University of Liverpool to run the ‘Research in Verse Poetry Competition’, open to staff and postgraduate research students across the university to submit poems about their research subject. The competition saw poems addressing all sorts of topics, ranging from gravity to slavery to life in the lab.

Dr Alex Stockdale’s poem ‘Public Health’ was praised by the judges as a notable entry:

Public Health

In a long corridor wailing
Bite
The virus knuckles and grasps
Enters cells
At birth was I living with him
His genome nestling in mine

Now fluid fills the belly
Tumour fills my liver
Hope left this station
Staring out the window
At a blue calm sky on a roaring hot day in Malawi

Too late they said
Too hard
Nothing more to say
I don’t have much time left to live but I want you to know
It could have been prevented

Background

This poem is about my research into liver disease in Blantyre, Malawi. We found that over 70% of liver cancer is caused by hepatitis B. Infection can be prevented by vaccination starting at birth and by antiviral treatment for pregnant women. Currently, vaccination starts at 6 weeks of age and my research is exploring whether this is sufficient to prevent transmission. This poem draws attention to the many people who present with late stage liver cancer in Malawi, for whom median prognosis is only 6 weeks at diagnosis, and for whom hepatitis B infection remains a preventable disease. 

Dr Alexander Stockdale is a clinical researcher at the University of Liverpool with a focus on viral hepatitis and HIV in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Vaccines and Protection by B.R. Shenoy

Vaccines protect us
Trigger an immune response
Prevent infection

by B.R. Shenoy

Mechanism of Action of Vaccines

“A vaccine works by training the immune system to recognize and combat pathogens, either viruses or bacteria. To do this, certain molecules from the pathogen must be introduced into the body to trigger an immune response.

“These molecules are called antigens, and they are present on all viruses and bacteria. By injecting these antigens into the body, the immune system can safely learn to recognize them as hostile invaders, produce antibodies, and remember them for the future. If the bacteria or virus reappears, the immune system will recognize the antigens immediately and attack aggressively well before the pathogen can spread and cause sickness”

— PublicHealth, ‘How Vaccines Work’

B.R. Shenoy is a biochemistry and chemical toxicology, M.S. She is a contributing writer for The Good Men Project. Her work has also appeared in Scary Mommy, Positively Positive, and Idle Inks. She is a content creator on Medium. You can catch up with her on Twitter @Shenoy100.

This sciku was originally published on Medium: https://medium.com/illumination/vaccines-and-protection-a-sciku-ca1491e36b13

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Privateer, the phage by Dr. Jolene Ramsey

What’s in the EM?
A crayon? A tailocin?
No, that’s Privateer!

By Jolene Ramsey

Proteus mirabilis is an opportunistic human pathogen, causing a large proportion of urinary tract infections. These infections are particularly severe in the elderly, and their treatment is recalcitrant to many antibiotics. There is great interest in using the natural predators of Proteus, their viruses (bacteriophages), to mitigate this issue. However, not many Proteus bacteriophage have been identified or characterized yet.

In our recent study (Corban & Ramsey, 2021), we describe a new phage called Privateer that infects and kills Proteus mirabilis. We first saw this phage in the electron microscope (EM) and noticed its unusual elongated head shape. Privateer has some interesting genes that seem to be common only among the closest related phages. Studies like these are the foundation for future applications combating multi-drug resistant bacterial problems.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.10645  

Jolene Ramsey studies bacterial viruses (phage) as a Center for Phage Technology postdoctoral researcher. She focuses on their explosive escape from the host cell after a successful infection. You can catch up with her on Twitter: @jrrmicro

Enjoyed Jolene’s sciku? Check out her other sciku ‘Click click go!’, ‘TF gets in on the bud’, ‘The Phriendly Phage’ and ‘Saba, the morning breeze’.

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Extrapolation

Extrapolation

from laboratory tests.

Not always correct?

 

Experiments within the laboratory are often used to understand biological interactions in a controlled manner. Yet research by Comforth et al (2018) suggests that what we learn from the laboratory may not always represent what happens in reality.

The researchers found that Pseudomonas bacteria (a pathogen that threatens immunocompromised people) behaved differently in humans compared to under laboratory conditions. This was particularly apparent in the levels of gene expression involved in antibiotic resistance, cell to cell communication and metabolism. The implications of this work suggest laboratory studies only take us so far and further understanding bacterial behaviour in humans is just as important.

Original research: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717525115

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Packaging signals by Maria White

Packaging signals:

Limiters of gene exchange

in influenza.

 

Influenza viruses, which have segmented genomes, can exchange genes through a process called reassortment, which can lead to the formation of novel influenza viruses. At the termini of each gene segment are regions called packaging signals, which direct the incorporation of each gene segment into virus particles during assembly.

A recent study by White et al (2017) demonstrated that heterologous packaging signals limit the efficiency of reassortment, but that this phenotype is dependent on the influenza virus gene segment being examined.

Of note, 85% of the reassortant viruses studied packaged a hemagglutinin (HA) segment carrying matched packaging signals relative to the background of the virus. The HA segment is of particular interest from a public health perspective due to its antigenic properties, and these data suggest that HA packaging signals could be an important factor in determining the likelihood that two influenza virus strains will undergo reassortment.

Original research: https://dx.doi.org/10.1128%2FJVI.00195-17

Maria White is a PhD candidate in the Immunology and Molecular Pathogenesis program at Emory University.