Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Strain (biology)
Summary
In biology, a strain is a genetic variant, a subtype or a culture within a biological species. Strains are often seen as inherently artificial concepts, characterized by a specific intent for genetic isolation. This is most easily observed in microbiology where strains are derived from a single cell colony and are typically quarantined by the physical constraints of a Petri dish. Strains are also commonly referred to within virology, botany, and with rodents used in experimental studies.
It has been said that "there is no universally accepted definition for the terms 'strain', 'variant', and 'isolate' in the virology community, and most virologists simply copy the usage of terms from others".
A strain is a genetic variant or subtype of a microorganism (e.g., a virus, bacterium or fungus). For example, a "flu strain" is a certain biological form of the influenza or "flu" virus. These flu strains are characterized by their differing isoforms of surface proteins. New viral strains can be created due to mutation or swapping of genetic components when two or more viruses infect the same cell in nature. These phenomena are known respectively as antigenic drift and antigenic shift. Microbial strains can also be differentiated by their genetic makeup using metagenomic methods to maximize resolution within species. This has become a valuable tool to analyze the microbiome.
Scientists have modified strains of viruses in order to study their behavior, as in the case of the H5N1 influenza virus. While funding for such research has aroused controversy at times due to safety concerns, leading to a temporary pause, it has subsequently proceeded.
In biotechnology, microbial strains have been constructed to establish metabolic pathways suitable for treating a variety of applications. Historically, a major effort of metabolic research has been devoted to the field of biofuel production. Escherichia coli is most common species for prokaryotic strain engineering. Scientists have succeeded in establishing viable minimal genomes from which new strains can be developed.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
Ontological neighbourhood
Related lectures (5)
Food Fermentation: Nature-Inspired Processing
Delves into the principles of food fermentation inspired by nature, exploring the historical background, benefits of probiotic-fermented foods, and safety aspects.
Genetic Circuits: Design and Synthesis
Explores the synthesis of genetic circuits, standardization of biological parts, and the importance of signal matching in genetic regulatory elements.
Metabolic Modeling: Data Integration
Covers genome-scale model reconstruction, data integration, and metabolic simulation.
Related publications (35)
Related people (3)
Related concepts (16)
Bacteria
Bacteria (bækˈtɪəriə; : bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were among the first life forms to appear on Earth, and are present in most of its habitats. Bacteria inhabit soil, water, acidic hot springs, radioactive waste, and the deep biosphere of Earth's crust. Bacteria play a vital role in many stages of the nutrient cycle by recycling nutrients and the fixation of nitrogen from the atmosphere.
Virus
A virus is a submicroscopic infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of an organism. Viruses infect all life forms, from animals and plants to microorganisms, including bacteria and archaea. Since Dmitri Ivanovsky's 1892 article describing a non-bacterial pathogen infecting tobacco plants and the discovery of the tobacco mosaic virus by Martinus Beijerinck in 1898, more than 11,000 of the millions of virus species have been described in detail.
Fungus
A fungus (: fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately from the other eukaryotic kingdoms, which, by one traditional classification, includes Plantae, Animalia, Protozoa, and Chromista. A characteristic that places fungi in a different kingdom from plants, bacteria, and some protists is chitin in their cell walls.