Dengue Fever Biology Essay

Assignment 1

Due Monday, Jan 31 at 2:30 pm

In the Sompayrac book, pathogens explain their own life cycle in a series of interviews. In a similar fashion, write up a response to the questions below from the point of view of one of the following pathogens:

• Dengue virus (doing dengue)
• Epstein-Barr virus (the pathogen that causes mono)
• Poliovirus
• Rabies virus

It is *key* that your answers reflect an understanding of how these different aspects of the pathogens life history interrelate with one another to form a cohesive set of adaptations. Be sure that your responses to the why half of the questions illustrate this, or else you will not earn full credit for each question. You may find it helpful to answer the first part of every question first, and then once you understand all of the aspects of your pathogens lifestyle, piece together how these facets form a cohesive set of adaptations.

Your answers will, of course, be much shorter and less detailed than Sompayracs.

Logistics:

Your responses must be typed, with 12 pt font, double-spaced, 1 inch margins required. Your response cannot be longer than 3 pages (plus references). Your answer to each question must be 1 or 2 paragraphs.

Upload as a Word document (with .doc or .docx file extension) or comparable word processing software (e.g. OpenOffice) to the Assignment 1 page on Canvas by Monday, Jan 31 at 2:30 pm.

Questions:

1. How do you get from one host to the next and enter their cells? And why do you choose this route? (4 points). Answers must explain how it gets from one host to the next, where an infection starts in the host, and why this fits in with the pathogens lifestyle.

2. How do you reproduce once you enter your target cells or tissues and why do you choose this  strategy? (3 points). Answers must explain how the pathogen replicates once inside the host (Does it use the hosts machinery? Does it feed on energy from the host? Etc.) How does this form of replication fit in with the pathogens lifestyle?

3. How do you evade your host defenses and why do you employ these evasion tactics? (3 points). Answers must explain how the pathogen interacts (or manages to avoid interacting) with the immune system and is able to overcome it. How does this evasion fit in with the pathogens lifestyle?

4. Where do you imagine yourself to be 1000 years from now? That is, what is one way (or more) that you imagine your human hosts or other aspect of your environment may change in the future, and how might you adapt to it? (4 points). For this question, remember that the human population is growing rapidly and population densities are increasing. The human species and our environment are also undergoing great changes (e.g. climate change, extinction of animal species, medical breakthroughs, economic development). How might any of these or similar conditions impact the pathogen you chose, and cause it to adapt its lifestyle via natural selection?

 Bibliography (1 point). Must:

• be consistently formatted (see http://www.lib.washington.edu/help/guides/44mla.pdf (Links to an external site.) for a good approach)
• include at least 5 sources
• include at least 2 sources that fall into any of the following types: books, book chapters, articles in scientific journals (e.g. in the Journal of Immunology), or government reports. Any of these can be posted online and still count.  Science stories in news outlets, no matter how reputable the outlet, do not count towards the 2 here.  Good sources for books and journal articles include:
  • https:// (Links to an external site.)ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ (Links to an external site.)
  • https:// (Links to an external site.)ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books (Links to an external site.)
• consist entirely of authoritative sources. Although this term can be difficult to define precisely, some good rules of thumb is:
  • could you imagine the author of this item being consulted on the topic by high-level policy-makers, e.g. health department officials?
  • could you imagine the author of this item being interviewed on the topic by a major and relatively politically neutral news outlet?
• Blogs or other websites can certainly be authoritative, but not generally if they are written by folks without clear credentials.