Serial passage is a virus attenuation technique developed originally by Louis Pasteur in the 1880s. It is similar to selective breeding, and can be used to create an attenuated strain of a virus to develop vaccines, or to increase the virulence of a viral strain in order to create epidemics.
The process involves infecting a series of host organisms with a virus. Each time the virus is given some time to incubate, and then the next host is infected with the incubated virus. The virus may mutate repeatedly into a form that is resistant to a wide variety of host immune system defenses, or a weaker strain may result.
Pasteur produced an early rabies vaccine by using serial passage to transmit the virus until an attenuated developed which could be used to stimulate an immune response without causing a pathological infection.
Scientists have observed that non-virulent forms of HIV can give rise to virulent strains after serial passage occurs in primates.
Serial passage is also used in antimicrobial testing to determine how quickly an organism can acquire resistance to an antibiotic.
Other articles related to "serial, serial passage, passage":
... proposed that HIV emerged because of rapid serial human-to-human transmission of SIV (after a bushmeat hunter or handler became SIV-infected) through unsafe or unsterile injections ... argument is the concept of adaptation by serial passage (or serial transmission) an adventitious virus (or other pathogen) can increase its biological adaptation to a new host species if it is rapidly ... (some of which made by themselves), in which the use of serial passage helped to adapt SIV to the new monkey species after passage by three or four animals ...
Famous quotes containing the words passage and/or serial:
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.”
—Bible: Hebrew Proverbs, 29:18.
President John F. Kennedy quoted this passage on the eve of his assassination in Dallas, Texas; recorded in Theodore C. Sorenson’s biography, Kennedy, Epilogue (1965)
“And the serial continues:
Pain, expiation, delight, more pain,
A frieze that lengthens continually, in the lucky way
Friezes do, and no plot is produced,
Nothing you could hang an identifying question on.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)