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The Double-Edged Sword: How Evolution Can Make or Break a Live-Attenuated Virus Vaccine

Overview of attention for article published in Evolution: Education and Outreach, November 2011
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About this Attention Score

  • In the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric
  • Among the highest-scoring outputs from this source (#12 of 468)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age (99th percentile)
  • High Attention Score compared to outputs of the same age and source (99th percentile)

Mentioned by

news
5 news outlets
twitter
192 X users
patent
4 patents
facebook
5 Facebook pages
wikipedia
5 Wikipedia pages
video
1 YouTube creator

Citations

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113 Dimensions

Readers on

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193 Mendeley
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Title
The Double-Edged Sword: How Evolution Can Make or Break a Live-Attenuated Virus Vaccine
Published in
Evolution: Education and Outreach, November 2011
DOI 10.1007/s12052-011-0365-y
Pubmed ID
Authors

Kathryn A. Hanley

Abstract

Even students who reject evolution are often willing to consider cases in which evolutionary biology contributes to, or undermines, biomedical interventions. Moreover the intersection of evolutionary biology and biomedicine is fascinating in its own right. This review offers an overview of the ways in which evolution has impacted the design and deployment of live-attenuated virus vaccines, with subsections that may be useful as lecture material or as the basis for case studies in classes at a variety of levels. Live- attenuated virus vaccines have been modified in ways that restrain their replication in a host, so that infection (vaccination) produces immunity but not disease. Applied evolution, in the form of serial passage in novel host cells, is a "classical" method to generate live-attenuated viruses. However many live-attenuated vaccines exhibit reversion to virulence through back-mutation of attenuating mutations, compensatory mutations elsewhere in the genome, recombination or reassortment, or changes in quasispecies diversity. Additionally the combination of multiple live-attenuated strains may result in competition or facilitation between individual vaccine viruses, resulting in undesirable increases in virulence or decreases in immunogenicity. Genetic engineering informed by evolutionary thinking has led to a number of novel approaches to generate live-attenuated virus vaccines that contain substantial safeguards against reversion to virulence and that ameliorate interference among multiple vaccine strains. Finally, vaccines have the potential to shape the evolution of their wild type counterparts in counter-productive ways; at the extreme vaccine-driven eradication of a virus may create an empty niche that promotes the emergence of new viral pathogens.

X Demographics

X Demographics

The data shown below were collected from the profiles of 192 X users who shared this research output. Click here to find out more about how the information was compiled.
Mendeley readers

Mendeley readers

The data shown below were compiled from readership statistics for 193 Mendeley readers of this research output. Click here to see the associated Mendeley record.

Geographical breakdown

Country Count As %
United States 3 2%
Netherlands 1 <1%
Thailand 1 <1%
Unknown 188 97%

Demographic breakdown

Readers by professional status Count As %
Student > Bachelor 35 18%
Student > Ph. D. Student 33 17%
Student > Master 28 15%
Researcher 20 10%
Professor > Associate Professor 8 4%
Other 24 12%
Unknown 45 23%
Readers by discipline Count As %
Agricultural and Biological Sciences 43 22%
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology 36 19%
Immunology and Microbiology 22 11%
Medicine and Dentistry 10 5%
Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutical Science 8 4%
Other 27 14%
Unknown 47 24%
Attention Score in Context

Attention Score in Context

This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 171. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 19 March 2024.
All research outputs
#237,387
of 25,522,520 outputs
Outputs from Evolution: Education and Outreach
#12
of 468 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#1,110
of 246,770 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Evolution: Education and Outreach
#1
of 10 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 25,522,520 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 99th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 468 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 20.8. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 97% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 246,770 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 99% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 10 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than all of them