Serial passage is a virus attenuation technique developed originally by Louis Pasteur in the 1880s. It is similar to selective breeding, and can be used to create an attenuated strain of a virus to develop vaccines, or to increase the virulence of a viral strain in order to create epidemics.
The process involves infecting a series of host organisms with a virus. Each time the virus is given some time to incubate, and then the next host is infected with the incubated virus. The virus may mutate repeatedly into a form that is resistant to a wide variety of host immune system defenses, or a weaker strain may result.
Pasteur produced an early rabies vaccine by using serial passage to transmit the virus until an attenuated developed which could be used to stimulate an immune response without causing a pathological infection.
Scientists have observed that non-virulent forms of HIV can give rise to virulent strains after serial passage occurs in primates.
Serial passage is also used in antimicrobial testing to determine how quickly an organism can acquire resistance to an antibiotic.
Famous quotes containing the words serial and/or passage:
“And the serial continues:
Pain, expiation, delight, more pain,
A frieze that lengthens continually, in the lucky way
Friezes do, and no plot is produced,
Nothing you could hang an identifying question on.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)