Pathogens!
Starring cats Toni and Buttercup
For my art project I created a comic with photography. My cats participated as the actors in the story. The story was inspired by my isolate project in this class, in which swabbed my cats mouths.
The microbiological concepts that I have focused on are pathogen/host interactions and antibiotic resistance.
Hosts have evolved incredible mechanisms to evade pathogens including the complement system, which leads to the opsonization of bacteria. Although this concept is intuitive (host evades pathogen), there are many complex and detailed mechanisms involved that constitute our immune system.
When the orange cat hears the word “pathogen’ she immediately assumes that a disease outbreak is going on. However, mechanisms in the feline immune system keep these pathogens from causing disease. Antibiotic resistance is also a natural process, but it can be accelerated by overuse of antibiotics by humans.