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11D: Leave saving the world to men? I don't think so

	Sunday, December 31, 2006

Mycoplasma Pneumoniae Just in time for New Year's festivities, I am showing the first signs of being infected with mycoplasma pneumoniae, the pathogen that was identified as causing my daughter's pneumonia earlier this month (she's fine now).  I sat cuddling a kid who coughed in my face for several hours each day for a couple of weeks, so it is no surprise I am now falling ill (the incubation period is three weeks).  Contrary to its name, M pneumoniae actually only causes pneumonia in about 10% or so of people infected (depending on the age group).  Most of the time it just causes bronchitis and malaise, which is what I appear to be coming down with.  At least, unlike my daughter, I am not allergic to antibiotics, so I can go see my doctor on Tuesday and get something to stop this in its tracks. In the meantime, I'm homebound because it is highly infectious. Anyway, today (while being homebound while my husband took the kids to see "Happy Feet" (which according to my husband sucked big time and, worse yet lasted for two entire hours)) I was doing some reading on mycoplasmas, and found that they are truly fascinating creatures.  Did you know that They are classified as bacterial, but have no cell wall Their genome is the shortest of any living organism It appears that they once had a cell wall, but then lost it through de-evolution.  They depend, in a parasitic way, on infecting vertabrate animals in order to replicate themselves within the host.  They have been evolving along with us for thousands of years.  Four mycoplasma species have specialized to humans and/or primates.  Mycoplasma pneumoniae is one of these.  It's been hanging around with us for a long, long time. I spent last summer doing research in computational genomic evolution, so all of this is interesting to me.  My apologies if you don't find this organism to be as interesting as I do.  If you want more information about this cool little bug, see http://gsbs.utmb.edu/microbook/ch037.htm 9:10:16 AM    comment []

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