What makesCryptococcus gattiia pathogen?

Pathogen flow: what we need to know.

We are in the midst of a global health crisis involving the spread of drug-resistant strains of a wide range of microorganisms [Levy & Marshall, 2004]. The evolution of resistance is driven by inappropriate prescription of antimicrobial drugs, the widespread use of antibiotics in agriculture, and failure by patients to complete courses of prescribed antibiotics. One recent study, for example, e...

What makes Cryptococcus neoformans a pathogen?

Life-threatening infections caused by the encapsulated fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans have been increasing steadily over the past 10 years because of the onset of AIDS and the expanded use of immunosuppressive drugs. Intricate host-organism interactions make the full understanding of pathogenicity and virulence of C. neoformans difficult. We discuss the current knowledge of the charact...

Vaccine-induced pathogen strain replacement: what are the mechanisms?

Host immune systems impose natural selection on pathogen populations, which respond by evolving different antigenic signatures. Like many evolutionary processes, pathogen evolution reflects an interaction between different levels of selection; pathogens can win in between-strain competition by taking over individual hosts (within-host level) or by infecting more hosts (population level). Vaccin...

What Can Phages Tell Us about Host-Pathogen Coevolution?

The outcomes of host-parasite interactions depend on the coevolutionary forces acting upon them, but because every host-parasite relation is enmeshed in a web of biotic and abiotic interactions across a heterogeneous landscape, host-parasite coevolution has proven difficult to study. Simple laboratory phage-bacteria microcosms can ameliorate this difficulty by allowing controlled, well-replicat...

Pathogen Reduction of Plasma