Tau-er of Power.

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Publication Year:
2015
Authors:
PubMed ID:
26380035
Public Summary:
Mention any disease and a few questions immediately come to mind. Chief among them: Who is vulnerable and how does it occur? If it’s an infectious disease, it may spread through the air or by touch. But the presiding dogma for most of modern biomedical history tells us that the transmissible agents contain nucleic acid and that replication is inextricably bound to DNA or RNA. As information vehicles, these molecules power the dual aspects of evolution: constancy and change. The constancy of faithful replication allows the inheritance of traits that allow life forms (including classical disease culprits) to survive. Through change, genes assure adaptability to a complex environment. These properties confer pathogenicity by enabling them to prey upon infectious agents and adapt to their hosts.