Thursday, July 1, 2010

SERENDIPITY IN THE FIELD OF MICROBIOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY


In the history of human scientific progress chance discoveries have played a major role. But the chance finds have always succeeded in hogging the limelight only when followed by careful and systematic scientific analysis.
Serendipity is defined as the ‘ability of making fortunate and unexpected discoveries by accident’. This term has an interesting origin.
It was coined in 1754, by an English novelist—Horace Walpole. Horace enjoyed foraging through reference works for information, and once chanced upon what he called ‘an exotic fairy tale’ that caught his imagination. It was a story about the three Princes of Serendip who were highly trained in arts and sciences. (Serendip or Serendib was the anglicized version of Swarnadweepa, the old name for Sri Lanka). The three Princes were privileged individuals not only gifted by their noble origin but also endowed with a unique talent: the gift of casual discovery. These three individuals were able to find answers to questions or mysteries they were not in search off. Thanks to their natural sagacity they would solve unexpected dilemmas.
Stopping at an inn one evening, they met a distraught man who had lost his camel. Although the three princes had not seen the camel, they asked the camel driver if the lost camel was blind in one eye, missing a tooth, and lame. This description was based on signs they had observed along their way. They also deduced that it probably carried a load of butter on one side and honey on the other, and was ridden by a pregnant woman. After this detailed description of the camel, the camel driver was convinced that the three princes had stolen his camel, and they were imprisoned. Later on, when the camel was found, the princes were released.
Horace must have found the gift of the three princes’ sublime. Though quite difficult to describe, he invented an expressive little word for their unique gift –
SERENDIPITY.

ROLE IN MICROBIOLOGY AND IMMUNOLOGY
1. smallpox vaccination

Smallpox vaccinationIn 1796, Edward Jenner, a British scientist and surgeon, had a brainstorm that ultimately led to the development of the first vaccine. A young milkmaid had told him how people who contracted cowpox, a harmless disease easily picked up during contact with cows, never got smallpox, a deadly scourge. With this in mind, Jenner took samples from the open cowpox sores on the hands of a young dairymaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with pus he extracted from Nelmes' sores. (Experimenting on a child would be anathema today, but this was the 18th century.) The boy developed a slight fever and a few lesions but remained for the most part unscathed. A few months later, Jenner gave the boy another injection, this one containing smallpox. James failed to develop the disease, and the idea behind the modern vaccine was born. Though doctors and scientists would not begin to understand the biological basis of immunity for at least 50 years after Jenner's first inoculation, the technique of vaccinating against smallpox using the human strain of cowpox soon became a common and effective practice worldwide.
A depiction of Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps, a boy of eight, on May 14, 1796.


2. Chicken Cholera:

Pasteur's later work on diseases included work on chicken cholera. During this work, a culture of the responsible bacteria had spoiled and failed to induce the disease in some chickens he was infecting with the disease. Upon reusing these healthy chickens, Pasteur discovered that he could not infect them, even with fresh bacteria; the weakened bacteria had caused the chickens to become immune to the disease, although they had not actually caused the disease. This discovery was an accident. His assistant Charles Chamberland had been instructed to inoculate the chickens after Pasteur went on holiday. Chamberland failed to do this, but instead went on holiday himself. On his return, the month old cultures made the chickens unwell, but instead of the infection being fatal, as usual, the chickens recovered completely.
Chamberland assumed an error had been made, and wanted to discard the apparently faulty culture out when Pasteur stopped him. Pasteur guessed the recovered animals now might be immune to the disease, as were the animals at Eure-et-Loir that had recovered from anthrax. In the 1870s, he applied this immunization method to anthrax, which affected cattle, and aroused interest in combating other diseases.
The notion of a weak form of a disease causing immunity to the virulent version was not new; this had been known for a long time for smallpox. Inoculation with smallpox was known to result in far less scarring, and greatly reduced mortality, in comparison to the naturally acquired disease. Edward Jenner had also discovered vaccination, using cowpox to give cross-immunity to smallpox, and by Pasteur's time this had generally replaced the use of actual smallpox material in inoculation.
The difference with chicken cholera and anthrax was that the weakened form of the disease organism had been generated artificially, and so a naturally weak form of the disease organism did not need to be found. This discovery revolutionized work in infectious diseases, and Pasteur gave these artificially weakened diseases the generic name of vaccines, to honor Jenner's discovery.
Louis Pasteur, whose own career involved serendipity when he accidentally discovered that attenuated microbes can be used for immunization  wisely noted that, "In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind."

3. Allergy
Charles Robert Richet, a French physiologist, made several experiments testing the reaction of dogs exposed to poison from the tentacles of sea anemones. Some of the dogs died from allergic shock, but others survived their reactions and made full recoveries. Weeks later, because the recovered dogs seemed completely normal, Richet wasted no time in reusing them for more experiments. They were given another dose of anemone poison, this time much smaller than before. The first time the dogs' allergic symptoms, including vomiting, shock, loss of consciousness, and in some cases death, had taken several days to fully develop. But this time the dogs suffered such serious symptoms just minutes after Richet administered the poison.Though Richet was puzzled by what had happened, he realized he could not disregard the unexpected result of his experiment. Later, he noted that his eventual conclusions about the dogs' affliction were "not at all the result of deep thinking, but of a simple observation, almost accidental; so that I have had no other merit than that of not refusing to see the facts which presented themselves before me, completely evident."Richet's conclusions from his findings came to form the theoretical basis of the medical study and treatment of allergies. He eventually proved that there was a physiological state called anaphylaxis that was the antithesis of prophylaxis: When an allergic subject is exposed to an allergen a second time, he or she is even more sensitive to its effects than the first time. Instead of building immunity to the substance through exposure (prophylaxis), the allergic subject's immunity becomes greatly reduced. In 1913 Richet received a Nobel Prize for his discovery and articulation of diseases of allergy.
Charles Robert Richet used poison from a sea anemone like this one in his experiments on allergies

4. Insulin
Frederick G. Banting, a young Canadian doctor, and Professor John J.R. MacLeod of the University of Toronto shared a Nobel Prize in 1923 for their isolation and clinical use of insulin against diabetes. Their work with insulin followed from the chance discovery of the link between the pancreas and blood-sugar levels by two other doctors on the other side of the Atlantic decades earlier. In 1889, German physicians Joseph von Mering and Oscar Minkowski removed the pancreas from a healthy dog in order to study the role of the pancreas in digestion. Several days after the dog's pancreas was removed, the doctors happened to notice a swarm of flies feeding on a puddle of the dog's urine. On testing the urine to determine the cause of the flies' attraction, the doctors realized that the dog was secreting sugar in its urine, a sign of diabetes. Because the dog had been healthy prior to the surgery, the doctors knew that they had created its diabetic condition by removing its pancreas and thus understood for the first time the relationship between the pancreas and diabetes. With more tests, von Mering and Minkowski concluded that a healthy pancreas must secrete a substance that controls the metabolism of sugar in the body. Though many scientists tried in vain to isolate the particular substance released by the pancreas after the Germans' accidental discovery, it was Banting and MacLeod who established that the mysterious substance was insulin and began to put it to use as the first truly valuable means of controlling diabetes.
5. Penicillin
The identification of penicillium mold by Dr. Alexander Fleming in 1928 is one of the best-known stories of medical discovery, not only because of its accidental nature, but also because penicillin has remained one of the most important and useful drugs in our arsenal, and its discovery triggered invaluable research into a range of other invaluable antibiotic drugs. While researching the flu in the summer of 1928, Dr. Fleming noticed that some mold had contaminated a flu culture in one of his petri dishes. Instead of throwing out the ruined dish, he decided to examine the moldy sample more closely.Fleming had reaped the benefits of taking time to scrutinize contaminated samples before. In 1922, Fleming had accidentally shed one of his own tears into a bacteria sample and noticed that the spot where the tear had fallen was free of the bacteria that grew all around it. This discovery peaked his curiosity. After conducting some tests, he concluded that tears contain an antibiotic-like enzyme that could stave off minor bacterial growth. Six years later, the mold Fleming observed in his petri dish reminded him of this first experience with a contaminated sample. The area surrounding the mold growing in the dish was clear, which told Fleming that the mold was lethal to the potent staphylococcus bacteria in the dish. Later he noted, "But for the previous experience, I would have thrown the plate away, as many bacteriologists have done before." Instead, Fleming took the time to isolate the mold, eventually categorizing it as belonging to the genus penicillium. After many tests, Fleming realized that he had discovered a non-toxic antibiotic substance capable of killing many of the bacteria that cause minor and severe infections in humans and other animals. His work, which has saved countless lives, won him a Nobel Prize in 1945.


In examining many of science’s most famous moments, serendipity has played a crucial role and we owe a debt to serendipity for some of the greatest discoveries in science. However, one needs to be aware that many of the principal beneficiaries of serendipity ‘clearly recognized’ the difference between an accident and an accidental discovery. In this context, Louis Pasteur put forth the famous quote, "in the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind".

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Practical Training For Biotechnology Students

BIOTECH INDUSTRIAL TRAINING PROGRAMME (BITP) 2010-2011

Department of Biotechnology invites applications from students in Biotechnology for Practical training in Biotech companies. Stipend of Rs. 8000 per month will be paid to selected candidates.


ELIGIBILITY
B.Tech./ B.E./ M.Sc./ M.Tech./ M.V.Sc in Molecular Genetics, Molecular Biology & Biotechnology, Neuroscience, Biochemical Engineering &Biotechnology, Bioprocess Technology, General/ Agricultural/ Industrial/ Marine/ Medical/ Pharmaceutical/ Environmental/ Plant/ Food/ Animal Biotechnology, completed in the year 2009 or 2010 with minimum 60% marks or equivalent grade.

Last date: 10 th July 2010
For Details Please Visit website: http://www.bcil.nic.in/

Sunday, June 27, 2010

OVERVIEW OF HUMAN MICROBIOME PROJECT

The Human Microbiome Project (HMP), launched by the National Institutes of Health Roadmap for Medical Research, is designed to fuel research into the human microbiome and to demonstrate correlations between changes in the microbiome and human health.
Microbiome is the totality of microbes, their genetic elements (genomes), and environmental interactions in a defined environment. A defined environment could, for example, be the gut of a human being or a soil sample. Thus, microbiome usually includes microbiota and their complete genetic elements.The expression microbiome was coined by Joshua Lederberg. . The microbiology of five body sites will be emphasized: oral, skin, vagina, gut, and nasal/lung.
Within the body of a healthy adult, microbial cells are estimated to outnumber human cells by a factor of ten to one. These communities, however, remain largely unstudied, leaving almost entirely unknown their influence upon human development, physiology, immunity, and nutrition. To take advantage of recent technological advances and to develop new ones, the NIH Roadmap has initiated the Human Microbiome Project (HMP) with the mission of generating resources enabling comprehensive characterization of the human microbiota and analysis of its role in human health and disease

Traditional microbiology has focused on the study of individual species as isolated units. However many, if not most, have never been successfully isolated as viable specimens for analysis, presumably because their growth is dependant upon a specific microenvironment that has not been, or cannot be, reproduced experimentally. Among those species that have been isolated, analyses of genetic makeup, gene expression patterns, and metabolic physiologies have rarely extended to inter-species interactions or microbe-host interactions.
  1. Advances in DNA sequencing technologies have created a new field of research, called metagenomics, allowing comprehensive examination of microbial communities, even those comprised of uncultivable organisms. Instead of examining the genome of an individual bacterial strain that has been grown in a laboratory, the metagenomic approach allows analysis of genetic material derived from complete microbial communities harvested from natural environments. In the HMP, this method will complement genetic analyses of known isolated strains, providing unprecedented information about the complexity of human microbial communities

    Broadly, the project has set the following goals:

    1. Determining whether individuals share a core human microbiome
    2. Understanding whether changes in the human microbiome can be correlated with changes in human health
    3. Developing the new technological and bioinformatic tools needed to support these goals
    4. Addressing the ethical, legal and social implications raised by human microbiome research.

    Notably, however, the utility of the techniques and technologies pioneered by the HMP will not be limited to studies of human health but will be applicable to the study of microbes in a wide range of biological processes. Microbes profoundly shape this planet and all life on it, and yet the test tube of the laboratory is rarely reflective of how they actually exist in the environment. The ability to study native microbial communities represents a fundamental shift in microbiology and is one whose implications can only be imagined.