Blurt!Commonplace Book

disease

“Wolves with antibodies against [Toxoplasma gondii] were significantly more likely to disperse (leave their packs and set out on their own) and to become pack leaders. Pursuing both of these courses of action constitutes aggressive and risky wolf behavior.”

posted Dec. 5, 2022, 8:00pm

“[P]eople who were homozygous (had two copies) of this protective gene variant involved in antigen presentation were 40 percent more likely to survive the plague than those with two copies of a deleterious variant, which encodes a broken protein.”

posted Nov. 3, 2022, 8:00pm

GISAID, a global database of influenza virus genetic sequences that typically gets thousands of flu sequences each year, has not received a single B/Yamagata sequence with specimen collection data after March 2020.”

posted Oct. 20, 2022, 8:00pm

“[T]he cases may arise from a co-infection of two different viruses—one of which could be an adenovirus and the other a hitchhiking virus—in children who also happen to have a specific genetic predisposition to hepatitis.”

posted Oct. 4, 2022, 8:00pm

“[I]t turned out that the strain of plague that ravaged northern Kyrgyzstan in 1338–1339 was an ancestor of every other 14th-century plague genome that has ever been sequenced. The plague strain from the Lake Issyk-Kul villages also seems to be the most recent common ancestor of four Y. pestis lineages that circulate in modern rodent populations.”

posted Sep. 25, 2022, 8:00pm