According to the June 2010 issue of ScienceDaily, the term “robust” can be described as an adjective that is appreciatively applied to specific vintage wines, however when describing pathogens and viruses, robustness is a property that may not be so attractive. It suggests microbes that are drug resistant and other superbugs that can cause havoc while researchers try to deal with novel pandemics. What are the ways to undercut this robustness?
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) recently published a study in the journal Chaos. The study examined organisms’ ability to survive and sustain themselves when faced with varied types of change. C. Brandon Ogbunugafor accompanied by his team, both form the Yale University, had a look at new as well as existing data in order to be able to determine the strengths and weaknesses of this study of robustness as a recognised concept and whether it could be applied in infectious systems. They discovered that while one must be cautious during the definition and application of the premise of robustness, the concept of infectious disease was filled with examples where additional application might prove to be useful. While introductory, the work of Doctor Ogbunugafor could indeed have far-reaching implications, taking into consideration the fact that the world is actually witnessing a rising amount of drug-resistant strains of disease.
Doctor Ogbunugafor explains that they believe that advance application of the robustness concept, along with experiments that are designed to examine it in other systems, might help in the way we study and deal with infectious diseases of varied types. Moreover, he adds that he finds this quite exciting, for it unveils fertile ground to apply an exciting concept in the context of infectious diseases that is greatly relevant to day-to-day life.
While there still remain a number of questions that are unanswered, the researchers are positive that if this concept is applied it could aid in the prediction of the way organisms evolve. Eventually, Ogbunugafor forecasts that the application of the concept of robustness could act as a “Rosetta Stone”, to predict evolution, which might represent the subsequent paradigm shift in evolutionary biology. He says that maybe by comprehending the way robustness manifests in illnesses such as malaria and influenza, for instance, we will be more able to forecast drug resistant variants even before they arise and as a result always stay a step forward the enemy in the omnipresent arms race between human beings and the microbes that threaten our health.
Source: Science Daily
Fri, Jun 25, 2010
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