{"id":1563,"date":"2009-08-06T11:23:06","date_gmt":"2009-08-06T15:23:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=1563"},"modified":"2009-08-06T11:23:06","modified_gmt":"2009-08-06T15:23:06","slug":"flu-evolving-in-the-human-body-ecosystem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2009\/08\/06\/flu-evolving-in-the-human-body-ecosystem\/","title":{"rendered":"Flu evolving in the human body ecosystem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">The field of disease ecology is a fast-evolving one as ecologists realize more and more that the insides of animals and plants are really like small-scale ecosystems, encompassing the same rules as large-scale ecosystems, like species interactions, environmental variability and evolutionary change.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Katia Koelle of Duke University gave a talk yesterday about evolution in the H3N2 virus \u2014 not to be confused with the H1N1 swine flu, even though it infects both pigs and humans. Since its emergence in 1968, this H3N2 virus has evolved at lightning speed: about one-third of the amino acids that make up its hemagglutinin protein (where the \u201cH\u201d comes from) have changed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">\u201cThat\u2019s a huge amount of evolution,\u201d Koelle said in a Duke statement. \u201cIf there\u2019s a new escape mutant that can actually so change the protein\u2019s configuration that our antibodies can\u2019t recognize the virus anymore, that means it\u2019s going to have a huge advantage and infect more of us. \u201c<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">Koelle and her colleagues developed a model to simulate the evolution of the virus in different hosts.\u00a0 Just like animals evolve differently in different environments where there are different selective pressures, the virus evolves differently in different hosts. Farmed pigs live only about two years, whereas the average lifespan for humans is about 80 years.\u00a0 The virus thus evolves quickly in humans, where there\u2019s ample time for the virus to be wiped out by the hosts\u2019 immunity. In pigs, though, new susceptible hosts appear much more often, so the virus has less pressure to evolve.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000\">\u201cHow much of an advantage a new virus strain has will depend on how many people have gotten infected in the past,\u201d Koelle said in the statement.<br>\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The field of disease ecology is a fast-evolving one as ecologists realize more and more that the insides of animals and plants are really like small-scale ecosystems, encompassing the same rules as large-scale ecosystems, like species interactions, environmental variability and evolutionary change. Katia Koelle of Duke University gave a talk yesterday about evolution in the H3N2 virus \u2014 not to&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,2],"tags":[126,301,102,307],"class_list":["post-1563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-events","category-research","tag-disease-ecology","tag-esa-annual-meeting","tag-evolution","tag-flu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}