Subtopic 1 Assessment:

IDENTIFICATION OF VIRUSES AND DIAGNOSIS OF VIRAL DISEASE

After completing this subtopic, students should have a clear understanding of the following:
• Viruses are tiny particles that must enter their host cell in during infection

• Researchers often work with unseen organisms. In our case, it was not necessary to visualize a virus for positive identification. Like prosecutors reconstructing a crime they did not attend, we can use other methods to clue us in on which virus we are dealing with:

• Each virus has its own specific host range; host ranges can be tested for viral identification
• Viruses contain genetic material in the form of RNA or DNA, which can be manipulated and analyzed in the lab by methods such as restriction mapping or PCR
• Computer-based bioinformatics tools are now widely used to study anything with genetic material, including viruses

• General knowledge about viral components can be combined with (in our case) general separation techniques to come up with clever, economically viable products

References:
(1) V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., PhD., and Sandra Blakeslee. 1998. Phantoms in the Brain. New York: William Morrow.

Main Topic - Overall Assessment:
VIRUSES


(Image from www.handpen.com/Bio/medical.htm, 2003)

Working through this module should have given students a sense of how a scientist might study a single organism or problem from many different angles, using whatever available tools to answer the question at hand. Hopefully students will have noticed that each approach is carefully planned, designed to address a specific aspect of the chosen topic, with all the proper controls in place. Each approach yields its own piece of information. None is complete. In the real world, the greatest strides in scientific understanding are made when several different groups of researchers realize they have been studying the same problem all along. Likewise, we must combine all puzzle pieces generated by each activity to see the whole virus.