Thursday, April 8, 2010
Find a protein using PDB explorer-describe your protein, including what disease state or other real-world application it has.
Poliovirus is the causative agent of poliomyelitis, which causes the degradation of the myelin sheaths of the Central Nervous System. Those who have polio usually lose their ability to walk and do other activities of daily living. 1DGI is a protein that is a precursor of the human poliovirus. Its structure is quartenary because it has 2 subunits. 1DGI does not cause poliovirus or necessarily mean that someone will have poliovirus.
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As of about 40 years ago, the polio virus was considered "erraticated" and therefore was no longer given as a vaccine to people. If you know of someone who is older than this, they usually will have a circular scar on their arm where the vaccine was initially administered. Do you think that stopping vaccination for the past several decades has been a smart decision? I wonder if the disease can resurface or if immunity can be passed on to children from their parents? Just something to think about! --Robin
ReplyDeleteI think that it always a tough decision when a virus/illness is labeled as erraticated because is usually not the case. For example, in the instance of the bubanic plague, it is considered to be erraticated because it was not currently effecting any one, it was not in circulation, but still existed in labs. So it could always come back. I think that same is true with the polio virus. It was considered to be erraticated, but is a virus that could easily come back. With the cessation of the vaccine, bodies do not have the immunity to the virus, but on the bright side there is decreased chance of the polio virus mutating to be prevalent even with those who had the vaccine. I'm not sure if the immunity has been passed down to children from parents. That would make for an interesting study.
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