Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Constructing Vaccines

http://www.theimmunology.com/animations/Vaccine.htm

This animation shows how vaccines are produced in various ways. In the past, vaccines have been produced with killed or inactivated pathogens. Another way to produce vaccine is the use of attenuated strain of the pathogen. Attenuated vaccine contains live but weaked microbes. However, the pathogen contains most of its antigen and it is able to start a immune response. Subunit vaccines are produced with the components of pathogens such as such as surface structure or fagella. Recombinant vaccine is produced by cloning the gene such as the surface protein structure from the pathogen into the host pathogen. For example, gene for a surface protein is cloned into the yeast cell. As a result, the yeast produces surface proteins which can be used as a vaccine.
This is related to our class since at the moment we are learning about immunization. Vaccination is one ways to acquire immunity without diease symptoms.

2 comments:

  1. very interesting post.I really enjoyed the animation. It help me to understand vaccines even more. Anshu did a good job explaining the processes in detail.

    - Ji-Hae (Jazmin)

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  2. This was well explained and I thought it was very interesting to know how vaccines are constructed. Vaccines are very important to all of us and its interesting to find out how they work and how they are made.

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