Why does Antigenic Shift make vaccine design particularly difficult for pathogens that have a wide host range?
What will be an ideal response?
Ans: Antigenic Shift is the biological process by which a new subtype or strain of a virus is formed by the combination of two or more subtypes or strains of the virus by combining their genomic material inside a cell; which ultimately alters their surface markers. For example, in the case of influenza, if one strain is H1N1 and another one is H5N2 then they may combine to give rise to a new strain H5N1. If a pathogen has multiple hosts than it has the opportunity to combine different strains in the secondary host giving rise to a new virus which might have the potency to affect either the primary hosts or new secondary hosts. For example, a virus which has a human strain and an avian strain may infect a cell of porcine at the same time. While injecting their genetic material and undergoing replication, these segments may be exchanged, giving rise to new strains that can again infect humans or may find new hosts. The development of vaccines against these new shifted viruses is difficult because every time a vaccine is developed looking into the surface markers of the native virus, there is always a chance of antigenic shift taking place where that specific surface marker is lost, making the new virus resistant to the vaccine.
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